A. Millar

Artist Info

A. MillarScottish, 1728 - 1768

LC name authority rec. nn50033644

LC Heading:Millar, Andrew, 1705-1768

found: Plomer, H. Dict. of printers and booksellers, 1726-1775, 1932 (Millar, Andrew, bookseller and publisher in London, (1) Buchanan's Head, near St. Clement's Church; (2) opposite Catherine Street, Strand, 1728-1768; said to have been born in Scotland 1707)

Millar, Andrew (1705–1768), bookseller, was born on 8 October 1705 at Port Glasgow, Renfrewshire, and baptized there on 16 October, the third of fourteen children of the Revd Robert Millar (1672–1752) and his wife, Elizabeth (bap. 1679, d. 1759), daughter of John Kelso, customs surveyor of Port Glasgow, and Mary Hamilton, his wife. Andrew's brothers entered the Presbyterian ministry, medicine, or the navy; his Kelso cousins were Ayrshire gentry and army officers.

In 1709 Robert was translated to Paisley Abbey, where Andrew probably attended the ancient grammar school until 1720, when he was apprenticed to the Edinburgh bookseller James McEuen. By 1727, when he appeared for him in Eyre v. Baskett and others. (TNA: PRO, C 11/2726/57), charged with selling piratical Scotch bibles, he was working at his master's Westminster branch ‘at Buchanan's Head, against St. Clement's Church in the Strand’ (Daily Journal, 4–11 Nov 1727), and he had taken over McEuen's shop and sign by February 1728. In 1728–9 he also conducted sales of libraries, with catalogues. Edinburgh books, sometimes reissued with cancel title-pages under Millar's imprint, bulked large in his initial stock, his father's influential History of the Propagation of Christianity among them. From this time until the end of 1738 James Thomson wrote a full quarter of Millar's imprints—nearly all printed by Henry Woodfall at nearby Temple Bar—and three-fifths of his copyrights. His first best-seller, a sensational three-part Defence of F. John Baptist Girard (October–November 1731), reportedly grossed 700 guineas (The Bee, 3, 1791, 127–31).

Millar became free of the Stationers' Company by redemption on 5 December 1738, though his freedom of London was delayed until 1744 (CLRO, CF 1/670 [old no. 120]). He was a vendor for the Society for the Encouragement of Learning (1739–49) and London agent for the Foulis press in Glasgow from 1741 and for Alexander Kincaid in Edinburgh from 13 July 1748, when he received the freedom of the city gratis (Scottish RS, 62, 1930, 139). In 1742 he moved to a better location, ‘opposite to Katherine Street in the Strand’ (Daily Post, 10 Sept 1742), near the bookshops of the Tonsons, François Changuion, and later John Nourse, and his trade began to shift from retailing to publishing. A decade later he was advertising a hundred titles, distributed among ‘Poetry’, ‘Divinity’, ‘History’, ‘Entertainment’ (i.e. novels), ‘Physic’, and science (London Evening-Post, October 1752). As early as Fielding's Amelia (1751) Millar inaugurated biennial pre-publication sales of his editions to the London trade, usually in November (Library, 24, 1969, 241–3). In 1763 he and William Strahan, his favoured later printer, were the first Scotsmen ever elected to the Stationers' court of assistants.

On 23 April 1730, at St Luke's, Chelsea, Millar married Jane (1710–1788), daughter of Andrew Johnston, a Westminster printseller, with a dowry of £500 (TNA: PRO, PROB 11/668, fol. 287); of their three children only Andrew survived infancy, to die in 1750, aged five and a half. Millar bound three apprentices: Robert Spavan (1730), who worked as his shopman until 1749; John Kelsey (1744), who was never freed; and Thomas Cadell (1758), his successor. Other ‘assistants’ were Thomas Becket, who left in 1760, and Millar's warehousemen Samuel Bladon and Robert Lawless. Cadell was running the shop by summer 1764 (BL, Add. MS 6858, fols. 33–4) and by July 1766 Millar would advertise 156 titles as ‘sold by T. Cadell’ (London Chronicle).

‘Though himself no great judge of literature’ Millar sensibly guided his purchase of copyrights by the advice of ‘very able men’ (Boswell, Life, 1.287)—and women, ‘for Miller durst not contradict his wife in any thing’ (Beattie's London Diary, 53). He paid his authors handsomely: £250 for Thomson's Liberty (1735–6), £600 for Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), and over £4000 for Hume's entire History of England (1754–62). He was also one of the first booksellers to advance money for unwritten titles, notably Johnson's Dictionary and Hume's Tudors. Unmindful of former favours Millar led the Stationers' war against Scottish reprints with a spate of lawsuits in the court of session in 1739 that closed in the House of Lords in 1751. His only victory, Millar v. Taylor (king's bench, 1766–9), was posthumous and soon overruled by the House of Lords, but litigation had postponed defeat. Irish ‘pirates’ posed a lesser threat, and indeed Millar sent advance sheets of Tom Jones to William Smith for reprinting in Dublin.

Enlisting editors like Thomas Birch, David Mallet, Patrick Murdoch, and Arthur Murphy, Millar actively enhanced the prestige of his older properties: James Harrington (1737), Milton's prose (1738), Sir Francis Bacon (1740), and Robert Boyle (1744). Share sales of his recensions perpetuated canons of Fielding ‘the novelist’ and Thomson the ‘Druid’ (later a ‘pre-Romantic’) down to the twentieth century. He promoted such lavish private publications as William Hunter's Anatomy of the Gravid Human Uterus (1774, but proposed 1752), Robert Wood's Ruins of Palmyra (1753), Mallet's works of Bolingbroke (1754), and Thomas Hollis's republican reprints.

Before the sale of Millar's copyrights on 13 June 1769, his executor Cadell skimmed off ‘Stock and Copies’ nominally valued at £1225 (BL, Add. MS 48808, pp. 14, 23), though copyright in Robertson, Hume, and Richard Burn alone had cost Millar over £7200. The remainder realized about £8500; in literature the richest titles were Thomson, Fielding, and Young; in language Johnson's Dictionary and the grammars of Bishop Lowth and Louis Chambaud; in science and mathematics James Ferguson and Colin Maclaurin; in technology Hannah Glasse's cookery book. Reference works numbered shares in Chambers's Cyclopaedia, Thomas Birch's enlarged translation of Bayle's Dictionary, and the voluminous Universal History.

After a lingering illness Millar died at his home, 25 Pall Mall, on 8 June 1768. The London Chronicle (7–9 June 1768) anticipated Johnson's tribute that he had ‘raised the price of Literature’. His £60,000 estate, £40,000 of it in Treasury bonds (Gazetteer, 9 June 1768), included a carriage, an Adam house (Survey of London, 29, 1960, 325–6), and a tradesman's country box at Kew, but prosperity had not altered Millar's manners or appearance. Hume joked about his superfluous thrift (Letters of David Hume, 1.310–11); he was ‘habitually and equably drunk’ (Boswell, Life, 3.389), with ‘the dross of a bookseller about him’ (The Bee, 6, 1791, 285). At Harrogate in 1763, in an ‘old well m[end]ed Suit of Cloathes’, Millar received two London newspapers; ‘Good Company’ smiled and nicknamed him Peter Pamphlet (Autobiography, ed. Burton, 222), after the shabby, newsmongering hero of Murphy's Upholsterer (1758). Millar's bequests commemorated a strongly commercial and national band of friends: Hume, Murdoch, Burn, Fielding's sons, Sir Andrew Mitchell, and Millar's godsons Spavan, Becket, and Strahan. He was buried at Chelsea; his widow, who married Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk at St James Westminster on 24 May 1770 and died on 25 October 1788, was buried beside him.

Hugh Amory

Sources Fasti Scot., new edn, vol. 3 · J. Paterson, History of the counties of Ayr and Wigton, 1 (1863), 743–5 · Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 3.386–9 · A. Millar, Books printed for and sold by Andrew Millar, at Buchanan's Head, over-against St. Clement's Church without Temple-Bar (1730?) [bound in copies of Thomson's Spring (1728) at the Humanities Research Center, U. Texas, and Bod.] · A catalogue of the copies and shares of copies of the late Mr. Andrew Millar (1769) [unique copy, partly priced, at John Murray Ltd; sale catalogue, 13 June 1769] · Boswell, Life · The letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (1932) · New letters of David Hume, ed. R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner (1954) · James Beattie's London diary, 1773, ed. R. S. Walker (1946) · Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle ... containing memorials of the men and events of his time, ed. J. H. Burton (1860); repr. as Anecdotes and characters of the times, ed. J. Kinsley (1973) · R. J. Goulden, The ornament stock of Henry Woodfall, 1719–1747 (1988) · G. Abbattista, ‘The business of Paternoster Row: towards a publishing history of the Universal history (1736–65)’, Publishing History, 17 (1985), 5–50 [appends provisional list of Millar's imprints, 1738–64] · W. McDougall, ‘Copyright litigation in the court of session, 1738–1749’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 5/5 (1971–87), 2–31 · H. Amory, ‘Andrew Millar and the first recension of Fielding's Works (1762)’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1981–5), 57–78 · register of births and baptisms, Port Glasgow, General Register Office for Scotland, Edinburgh · will, dated 20 Feb 1768, proved, 17 June 1768, TNA: PRO, PROB 11/940, sig. 250 [abstracted in V. L. Oliver, The history of the island of Antigua, 2 (1896), 265; registered in the commissariat of Edinburgh, 11 Sept 1782, for £5 interest owing by his cousin Capt. John Kelso (d. Aug. 1782) on a bond of £2472, NA Scot., CC 8/8/125/2, fols. 423r–430v] · Dame J. Grant's will (dated 12 Oct 1787 with codicil, 10 June 1788, proved 6 Nov 1788), TNA: PRO, PROB 11/1171, sig. 536 [abstracted in V. L. Oliver, The history of the island of Antigua, 2 (1896), 265] · R. Myers, ed., Records of the Stationers' Company, 1554–1920 [1984–6] [microfilm] · D. F. McKenzie, ed., Stationers' Company apprentices, [3]: 1701–1800 (1978) [abstracts from court bks and apprentice memorandum bks] · W. Strahan, ledgers, including memoranda on the Millars on 48803A, fol. 103v, BL, Add. MSS 48800–48808 [in R. Austen-Leigh, ‘William Strahan and his ledgers’, The Library, 4th ser., 3 (1922–3), 279; see also microfilm edn, ed. P. Hernlund (1989)] · R. D. Harlan, ‘William Strahan: eighteenth century London printer and publisher’, PhD diss., U. Mich., 1960 [incl. best conspectus of the archive] · inland revenue board returns on apprentices, TNA: PRO [indexed by I. Maxted, The British book trades, 1710–1777 (1983)]

Archives BL, letters to Thomas Birch, Add. MSS 4256, 4314, 4475, 4477 · BL, Sir A. Mitchell, corresp., Add. MS 6858, fols. 28–34 · BL, Society for the Encouragement of Learning, corresp., Add. MS 6190 · NA Scot., letters to Andrew Mitchell · NL Scot., Culloden MSS, corresp., MSS 2968–2970 · NL Scot., David Hume MSS, corresp., MS 23156

Wealth at death £60,000; incl. £40,000 ‘in the funds’: Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (9 June 1768)

Hugh Amory, ‘Millar, Andrew (1705–1768)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/18714, accessed November 2015.