Anchor Close: Birthplace of the Encyclopaedia Britannica

Why is it significant?

Walk into the narrow slot of Anchor Close and try to imagine the clatter of a printing press. There is little to see now except old stones and a nameplate, but in the second half of the eighteenth century this lane was one of the busiest addresses in the intellectual life of Europe.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk into the narrow slot of Anchor Close and try to imagine the clatter of a printing press. There is little to see now except old stones and a nameplate, but in the second half of the eighteenth century this lane was one of the busiest addresses in the intellectual life of Europe.

In a printing house here, between 1768 and 1771, a printer and scholar called William Smellie produced the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It came out in weekly instalments and was then bound into three volumes. Smellie wrote and edited much of it himself, while two Edinburgh men, the engraver Andrew Bell and the printer Colin Macfarquhar, put up the money. The most famous reference book in the English-speaking world began as a local publishing gamble in a close off the High Street.

Smellie was a man of enormous reading and a great fondness for drink and argument. He founded a club that met in Dawney Douglas's tavern in this close, and its members called themselves the Crochallan Fencibles, a joking imitation of a militia regiment. They sang bawdy songs, played elaborate pranks on newcomers and argued about everything under the sun. In 1787 Smellie brought along a new friend: Robert Burns.

Burns loved it. Smellie's press was printing the Edinburgh edition of his poems, and the poet is said to have spent long hours in the printing house reading his proofs. The rude verses Burns wrote and collected for his fellow Fencibles were later published as The Merry Muses of Caledonia, a book that respectable Victorian admirers of the poet preferred to pretend did not exist.

The tavern and the printing house are long gone, swept away as the city rebuilt this slope. What remains is the name, and an idea born here: that all knowledge could be gathered, printed and sold to anyone who wanted it. Now climb back up to the High Street, turn left, and walk downhill past the crossroads with North Bridge. On the same side of the street, look for the entrance to Carrubber's Close.