Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Month: November 2021

Individual Readers at the Royal High School

One of my favourite things about working with library borrowers’ records is getting to know the individual quirks and tastes of specific borrowers. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the borrowing habits of the boys at the Royal High School began to diversify. Prior to this, a large majority visited the library to borrow […]

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A First Look at the Advocates Library

We have now taken delivery of a first set of images from the borrowers’ receipt books of the Advocates Library with the permission of our partners the Faculty of Advocates and via the digitisation skills of our partners the National Library of Scotland. Our Digital Humanities Research Officer Brian Aitken has loaded these to our […]

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The Records of the Bristol Library Society

Taking advantage of the recent loosening of Covid-19 restrictions, I was finally able to make the long trip to Bristol to access the library records which form the other half of my doctoral project. My project examines political reading and library membership at two British subscription libraries during the first three decades of the nineteenth […]

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COP26 – Part 2: Latent Heat at the University Library

This is the second of a pair of blogs exploring environmental aspects of the study of borrowing records from historic Scottish libraries, in recognition of the globally significant COP26 conference taking place in Glasgow in November 2021. In April 1762, the Regius Professor of the Practice of Medicine at the University of Glasgow, Joseph Black, […]

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COP26 – Part 1: Glasgow, Birthplace of the Anthropocene

This is the first of a pair of blogs exploring environmental aspects of the study of borrowing records from historic Scottish libraries, in recognition of the globally significant COP26 conference taking place in Glasgow in November 2021. In 1763, the Greenock-born engineer James Watt was employed as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow. […]

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