Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Month: October 2020

Political Readers and the Associational Reading Space: Starting a PhD on Library Records

by Josh Smith Recovering evidence of historical reading can often be a fraught endeavour for the historical researcher as the purpose and act of reading remains intrinsically personal to the individual reader. Yet library borrowing records are one of the clearest sources available to those assessing which printed publications historical audiences engaged with. Of course, […]

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Subject Classifications

An important consideration for our Books and Borrowing database is how useful it will be for researchers. Not just us, but anyone who would like to use our data in the future. One question our team has been working on is how to classify the thousands of entries our database will contain. Our original vision […]

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Broughton House Visit

Broughton House in the coastal town of Kirkcudbright is the former home of the colourist painter Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933), who was part of the ‘Glasgow Boys’ circle. This beautiful Georgian townhouse, which once belonged to Alexander Murray (c.1680-1750), Provost of Kirkcudbright and formerly a local MP, is now a museum managed by the National […]

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A year at Westerkirk

Back in July, I wrote about my trip to the evocative Westerkirk Parish Library in Dumfriesshire to photograph materials for the Books and Borrowing project. The process of adding records from the library’s manuscript borrowing register (styled the ‘Kalendar’ by its users) into the database is now well underway, and I recently passed a minor […]

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