ABSTRACT
Between 1793 and the mid-1840s Edinburgh music publisher George Thomson edited numerous volumes of Scottish, Welsh and Irish folk songs with new lyrics by over 80 contemporary literary men and women, including most importantly Robert Burns, and with new musical arrangements by Pleyel, Kozeluch, Haydn, Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber and Hummel. In 'Thomson's collections of national song', published in 1940, bibliographers valiantly attempted to find a pathway through numerous volumes of varying dates, so that scholars might be able to follow the histories of individual musical settings throughout the various volumes. Thomson was obsessed from the beginning of his publishing venture with high standards of presentation: the aesthetics of his product relied equally upon its artistic content and its visual beauty. Thomson followed the general pattern of the bigger non-musical Scottish publishers by having an almost wholly Scottish production line while at the same time forging a strong link with a much bigger London publisher.
