Andrew Symson ca.1638-1712

Andrew SYMSON or SIMSON ca.1638-1712

Biographical Note

Andrew Symson was the youngest son of Andrew Symson, author of an English/Latin/Greek lexicon (issued in 1658) and several biblical commentaries. He was possibly born in England but attended the High School in Edinburgh and then Edinburgh University, where he gained his M.A. in 1661. Having taught Latin at the High School of Stirling, he was licensed to preach by the Bishop of Edinburgh in 1663 and was thereafter appointed to the parish of Kirkinner, Wigtownshire, moving to Douglas in Lanarkshire in 1686. He demitted office, whether by inclination or necessity is not known, after the flight of James VII and accession of William III and Queen Mary, settling first in Perthshire and finally in Edinburgh, where he set up a printing house and traded as a bookseller and publisher. He was also an author himself, compiling a history of Galloway for Sir Robert Sibbald which was not published until 1823, and a 4,000-line long epic poem on the three Jewish patriarchs (Tripatriarchicon) printed for the author in 1705, as well as other poems.

Books

Symson declared that books were ‘my delight, my heart, worth nectar and ambrosia’. After his death in 1712, an auction sale and a lottery sale of his books were arranged in Edinburgh, and catalogues for both parts announced in the press as being shortly available. No copy of the catalogue of the auction sale has survived, but copies of the lottery catalogue, with 440 lots described, have. It is clear that much of the content of this sale was his bookselling and printing stock, given that a good number of titles were present in multiple copies. This fact and the disappearance of any copy of the auction catalogue mean that the extent and content of Symson’s private library cannot be ascertained. In the event, the lottery appears not to have taken place: according to a printed slip in the National Library of Scotland’s copy of the catalogue, 233 parcels were ‘already disposed of’ by an unstated method, and the other 207 were to be auctioned.

Sources

• Bibliotheca Symsoniana, a Catalogue of the Vast Collection of Books in the Library of the late Reverend and Learned Mr Andrew Symson. The First Part. Containing Such of his Books, as are to be Expos’d by Way of Lottery … 1712. This Consists of near Four Thousand Volumes … Divided into 440 Parcels According to an Equal Number of Tickets to be Delivered Out …(Edinburgh: 1712). ESTC T189788
• Jackson, Clare ‘Symson (Simson), Andrew (c.1638-1712), Church of Scotland minister and printer’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Scott, Hew, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: the Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation. New ed., 7 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1915-1928), II, 365; III, 301-303