PATRICK CORBET was well known to the Customs Commissioners at Edinburgh for his forceful ways and artful dodges. But perhaps even he was surprised when with another two Excise officers he inspected a heavily laden carrier's cart at the Glasgow weighhouse on 2 August 1781. It was the mother-lode of books smuggled from Ireland.
Corbet had earlier drawn official disapproval when he led a raid on a druggist's shop over eight pounds of rhubarb which he claimed had been illegally taken off an East India ship at Leith. In 1766 he was accused by merchants, from whom he had impounded 16,000 pounds of tobacco, of selling on seized goods which he had bought at auction. He appears in the following year as the only bidder at an Excise auction of wine, silk handkerchiefs, licorice, and spectacles.
On 15 September 1773 Corbet's detective work led him to the Clyde to board a light transport where he and other officers found books illegally imported from Ireland. Included were Bibles with forged title pages, which were given to one of his colleagues, James Wallace, to take to the Customs warehouse. The boat owner and the Glasgow printer who had ordered the Bibles got the man drunk on the way and sent him back with a bribe of six shillings for the officers. The Customs lost the Bibles, Wallace having been too drunk to be a reliable witness in the prosecution.
By the late 1770s, legitimate imports of Irish reprints to Scotland had all but dried up. The wagon Corbet stopped in 1781 included pirated editions of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, and other titles. The Customs Commissioners, at a meeting chaired by Adam Smith, heard from Corbet and his colleagues that the books, which had arrived by the brig Polly from Dublin, were intended for the Stirling bookseller, William Anderson, by way of carrier John Barclay's cart. In the meantime Corbet had refused a bribe of £25 for the return of the books.
By order of the Commissioners, Corbet stopped Barclay's cart again on 16 October 1781 and found more smuggled books, including copies of Johnson's Lives of the Poets for Dunlop & Wilson of Glasgow, and William Blackstone's Reports of Cases for Anderson of Stirling. Subsequent seizures in early 1782 revealed that Morison and Son of Perth were receiving smuggled titles that included William Robertson's History of Scotland, History of Charles V and History of America. The raids led the London firms of William Strahan, Thomas Cadell, and James Dodsley, to take out summonses against the Scottish booksellers involved.
Normally, after goods were condemned and sold, the Customs or Excise officer who had made the seizure was entitled to part of the proceeds. Pirated books, having no legal value, were less remunerative. After the first two seizures of books in Glasgow, Corbet and his colleagues complained that they had seized 16,263 sheets but had received nothing apart from ten guineas, probably provided by William Creech of Edinburgh on behalf of the copyright owners. The Commissioners appear to have ignored their complaints and no further rewards were paid until 1785, when, after the discovery at Greenock of a large quantity of Blair's Sermons and Johnson's Dictionary on a ship from Dublin, Creech again provided £10 to be shared among the officers.
The correspondence of the Customs Collectors in western Scotland shows little evidence of highway seizures after their efforts of 1781-82. In the meantime, Corbet continued on his controversial career as an Excise officer until his death in 1788.
Warren McDougall is an Honorary Fellow of The University of Edinburgh
and was recently scholar in residence at Champlain College, Trent University.
He is editor of volume two of A History of the Book in Scotland and is completing a study of the bookseller, Charles Elliot.
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