Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Author: Gerard McKeever

Abbotsford; or, The Day Out

The ‘Books and Borrowing’ team recently had the pleasure of a long-awaited trip to Abbotsford, the former home of Walter Scott on the river Tweed in the Scottish Borders. As I have discussed previously here and here on this blog, Scott has a peculiar importance for the study of library borrowing records between 1750 and […]

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Guest Post – University of Glasgow Library borrowing registers, beyond the borrowing: what additional insights can they provide?

by Robert MacLean, Assistant Librarian in Archives and Special Collections, University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections (ASC) at the University of Glasgow holds the institution’s historical library records, including old catalogues, library committee minutes, acquisition ledgers and the registers recording when books were borrowed and by whom. Until recently these have been rather overlooked […]

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Event Report: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow

We had the pleasure of running an event in Glasgow University Library Special Collections last week. This was an opportunity for us to share some of the research we have done specifically on the university’s own records, while bringing together colleagues with cognate interests to think more expansively about the Glasgow context and about the […]

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Event Preview: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow

On Thursday 7th April, we are running the next of our project events: ‘Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow’ will be a convivial in-person/online workshop exploring eighteenth-century literary culture using the borrowing records of Glasgow University Library. It is being co-produced with our partners at GUL Special Collections. The event will be an opportunity to […]

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Anatomy of a Holding: Robert Burns at the Wigtown Subscription Library

The accounts of the Wigtown Subscription Library in Galloway register a payment of one pound, eleven shillings and sixpence for ‘Burns’s works’ on 22 October 1800, followed by a payment of sixpence for ‘Carriage from Dumfries’ five days later.[1] Cross-reference to the library’s borrowing registers reveal that this text was in four volumes, confirming it […]

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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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A First Look at the Aberdeen Theological Library

In 1826, the first of a series of royal commissions was established that would report on the condition and management of the Scottish universities at intervals in the nineteenth century. The range of materials gathered by the commissioners today provide historians with an extraordinary insight into the evolution of Scottish education, including the operation of […]

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Writing One’s Own Story with Walter Scott

Your author’s quill commands no life to grow The codex mute remains in dusty gloom ’Till, tripping lightly thro’ the antique stacks A bookworm sings themselves in unison With inky song.                                    Old Play [1] In 1816, the anglophone […]

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Celebrity Spotting – Robert Riddell at St Andrews

Work has been continuing on the massive body of borrowing data we have from St Andrews University library. With the roughly 4,000 records of the 1748-1753 mixed professors/students register entered into our system, my attention has recently been on the 1772-1776 student ledger. This volume presents some distinctive challenges. In general, librarians’ record-keeping develops a […]

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