This chapter shows how the best-selling novelist Walter Scott turned the era’s rhetoric of excess to his own commercial ends. Scott’s novels were frequently and directly compared with those published by the Minerva Press in the previous two decades; Scott’s defenders marked the 1814 publication of Waverley as the death knell of Minerva, while his detractors habitually remarked upon the parallels between his numerous, voluminous novels and those produced in equally large quantities by the Press. In readings of Scott’s early novels and his self-conscious paratexts, the chapter shows how his novels explore an antiquarian system of valuation in which even the most uninteresting document becomes valuable to posterity as soon as it’s rare. Scott uses this logic to offer a unique defence of the ‘innumerable’ popular novels that flowed from his pen and from the Minerva’s printing presses: their great numbers, he suggests, increase their chance of long-term survival. As both Scott and the Minerva Press authors who wrote alongside him argue in various ways, prolificity may ultimately lead to literary prestige rather than undermine it.

The Conclusion traces the afterlife of the knots of memory examined in earlier chapters in two printed genres: the multi-volume histories of the nation that became popular in the late eighteenth century and the historical novel in the hands of Walter Scott. Works such as David Hume’s and Tobias Smollett’s histories replicate some of the counter-memories that were produced in the earlier printed discourse on the nation. Scott, however, transforms the complicated knots of memories and counter-memories by drawing attention to and framing them. Waverley, for example, both acknowledges the power of counter-memories and prevents their re-activation by including them within a narrative that connects a progressive sense of a consolidated British cultural memory with a model of media succession.