Month: September 2022
Forgotten Best-Sellers: Susan Ferrier’s The Inheritance (1824)
In 1824, Edinburgh-born Scottish novelist Susan Ferrier published her second of three novels, titled The Inheritance. The Inheritance was preceded by Marriage, published in 1818, and followed by Destiny, which was published in 1831. Ronnie Young describes The Inheritance as ‘the most critically successful of [Ferrier’s] works’,[1] and indeed, on 11 June 1824, Ferrier’s publisher, […]
Farewell to Gerry McKeever and Alex Deans
This week, I have the sad task of bidding farewell to postdoctoral research fellows Gerry McKeever and Alex Deans. Gerry leaves the Books and Borrowing team to take up a Lectureship in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh, while Alex returns to the University of Glasgow to work on a research project very […]
A Visitor to Innerpeffray Library: Héloïse Russell-Fergusson
Reposted with permission from the Innerpeffray Library Blog’s ‘Visitor Vignettes’ series The Innerpeffray Library visitors’ books contain signatures and details of visitors to the library from 1859 to the present day – with each modern visitor adding to the living archive. By digitising and investigating the information within the visitors’ books, it is possible to […]
Forgotten Best-Sellers: The World Displayed; or, a Curious Collection of Voyages and Travels
From the moment I began to seriously crunch the numbers on the borrowers’ records of the Royal High School, the unrivalled popularity of two titles came to the fore: Charles Rollin’s Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians, and Greeks and The World Displayed; or, a Curious Collection of Voyages […]