Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Month: March 2021

A Painted Literary Parthenon for the Athens of the North

Any keeper of books will know that space is always at a premium and by the late 1790s, two Edinburgh institutional libraries found that they needed more shelves to house their collections. The Faculty of Advocates and the Writers to the Signet came together to create a library complex next to Parliament House. The Signet […]

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Women Borrowers at Westerkirk Library

To mark Women’s History Month, we’re running a series of blogs to highlight the women who wrote and borrowed the books found in our libraries. Today, I’m returning to Westerkirk Library in Dumfriesshire, where a small but active cohort of women members made over 250 borrowings between 1813 and 1818. Eight of the 120 borrowers […]

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Seeking the Sublime: Elizabeth Montagu in Scotland, August 1766

Cuchullin sat by Tura’s wall; by the tree of the rustling leaf.—His spear leaned against the mossy rock. His shield lay by him on the grass. As he thought of mighty Carbar a hero whom he slew in war; the scout of the ocean came, Moran the son of Fithil. – Fingal, Book I Elizabeth […]

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Women Borrowers

Today is International Women’s Day, and so I have been reflecting on the women in our records. I thought I would begin with a famous passage from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which the speaker is barred from entering a library in one of the ‘Oxbridge’ colleges: [H]ere I was actually at […]

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Library Lives: Books, Borrowers, and Beyond: Innerpeffray Library, Saturday 22 May

The Books and Borrowing Project is pleased to announce the project’s first public event, to be held at the famous Innerpeffray Library on 22nd May at 2pm. This free online event will highlight Innerpeffray’s unique Borrowers’ Register and the stories it can tell about the library’s books and borrowers. Come along to find out about […]

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World Book Day with Books and Borrowing

Today, Thursday 4 March 2021, we celebrate World Book Day with a look at some of the favourite books in our partner libraries’ records. In some of our previous blogs, Alex Deans wrote about the popularity of Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810) at Westerkirk Miners’ Library in the period 1813 to 1816, Gerard McKeever […]

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Books, Borrowing, and the Bannatyne Club

By Kelsey Jackson Williams Not many people today would recognise the Bannatyne Club if you mentioned it in casual conversation, but in 1820s Edinburgh it was a name on everyone’s lips.  Branded ‘harder to gain entry to than parliament’, the exclusive society, at first limited to thirty-five members, later to a hundred, had been founded […]

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