Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Month: August 2020

The (Huge!) Borrowing Records of St Andrews

One of the most interesting aspects of the ‘Books and Borrowing’ project is the diversity of the libraries we are dealing with. Our fourteen (soon, perhaps, to be fifteen – watch this space!) target libraries with surviving borrowing registers range from community institutions in small towns to major collections based at the ancient universities. This […]

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Books and Borrowing and the First Scottish Enlightenment, a guest post by Kelsey Jackson Williams

Purchasing a book is, as we all know, very different from reading it.  Too often, however, book historians are forced to rely on our knowledge of what books were purchased in the face of an absence of evidence of what books were actually read.  This is one of the reasons I find the Books and […]

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Leadhills Heritage Trust

Surfing the Yesterday channel a few days ago, I was surprised and delighted to spot a familiar figure on the Antiques Roadshow! The roadshow was taking place at New Lanark in 2017, and John Crawford, member of our Advisory Board, and Chair of Leadhills Heritage Trust, had taken in a banner from Leadhills Miners’ Library. […]

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Book: Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831

Having now officially come on board with ‘Books and Borrowing’ (hooray!) and by way of introduction, I’d like to use this first blog post to say a few words about my recently published monograph and how it relates to the project research. While our team collectively works to gather, process and analyse historic borrowing data […]

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Religious Occupations

Over the past few weeks, one of the things we have been discussing as a team is how to structure data about our borrowers in order to make the eventual search and browse functions as flexible and useful as possible. Our friends at the Libraries, Reading Communities & Cultural Formation in the C18th Atlantic project […]

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