Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Month: November 2022

Metaphors of Reading, 1760-1830

For the past few weeks, Cleo and I have been working together on an article that we hope to submit for publication fairly soon. We thought we would share some initial thoughts about it on this blog. The topic of the article is metaphors that we have spotted in a variety of different works from […]

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Bruce, the Bible, and a Borrowing: James Bruce of Kinnaird and the Leighton Library, Dunblane

Working with historical borrowing records provides you with a host of names. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the challenges of researching the biographical details of our library borrowers. In the modern age of scholarly research, the first step in such an endeavour is often a trusty web search in the hope of […]

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Another Forgotten Bestseller: Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830)

To celebrate Book Week Scotland this week, we are presenting another forgotten bestseller. “It was a dark and stormy night”. Inspired by Linda Cracknell’s Creative Writing workshop in August, I decided to read the book with that famous first line. The book is, of course, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Paul Clifford, first published in 1830, and […]

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Libraries, Lives and Legacies: Further Details on our Call for Papers for April 2023

This week, we’d like to highlight the Call for Papers we posted a couple of weeks back (posted again in full below) and provide a bit of extra detail about our Research Festival. In April 2023, Books and Borrowing and our friends on the C18th Libraries Online project expect to be able to launch initial […]

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