In a remarkable book published in 1946, R. M. W. Cowan covered the expansion of newspapers in Scotland from 1815 until the 1850s. The thesis was submitted for a D.Litt. at Glasgow University in 1937 but, because of the war, could not be published until 1946. What is remarkable is that even a cursory look at the 145 newspapers listed – and most of his examinations were far from cursory – required a huge amount of effort when many papers were still scattered around the country in the hands of the publishers and in local libraries. By the time Cowan's thesis came to preparation for publication, even the British Museum newspaper collection at Colindale was out of action, some of it damaged or destroyed by enemy bombing, other volumes packed away for safety in a quarry in Wiltshire.

A decade after Cowan's book, Joan Ferguson, of what was then the Scottish Central Library, published an invaluable Directory of Scottish Newspapers which was updated by the National Library of Scotland in 1984. This listed 1,178 individual newspapers and their location and the present writer has only been able to find two or three gaps in that list.

In 1989 came the excellent two volumes of Waterloo Directory of Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, edited by Professor John S. North of the Department of English at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Nowhere else can scholars find anything so detailed and so well cross-referenced and indexed as these two thousand-plus pages. It goes well beyond newspapers and journals and includes reports of associations, almanacs, postal directories and a plethora of religious pamphlets. It was an extraordinary team effort, involving visits to more than eighty libraries. In a pre-digital age it tried, where possible, to identify owners, printers and editors, along with the sizes, prices and publication dates. It was no easy task but, as the introduction to the volume states, ‘better to know one editor of fifteen in a journal's life span than none’.

At least one aim of the present work is to try to rescue many more editors and journalists from obscurity. Thirty years ago a leading pioneer of research on journalism, Joel Wiener, argued that ‘it is imperative that we become more knowledgeable about the human element behind journalism’; not an easy task and, intriguingly, often more difficult in the twentieth century than earlier.