Author: Kit Baston
Digital Picket
We are observing the strike actions called by the University and College Union (UCU) and respecting the digital picket. Our blogs will return October. The UCU website has more information about the strike actions.
Forgotten Best-Sellers: ‘Bell’s Surgery’
‘Bell’s Surgery’, or, to give it its proper title, A System of Surgery, was published in its first edition in six volumes between 1783 and 1788. It was a popular textbook that became what Richard Sher describes as a ‘strong seller’[1] with seven editions in print by 1801. Its influence went beyond its sales figures. […]
Visiting the Advocates Library in the 18th Century
We are fortunate that some of our Books and Borrowing libraries survive in forms our eighteenth and nineteenth century borrowers would recognise. The books of Innerpeffray Library and the Leighton Library still live in their original homes of 1762 and 1687 respectively. For other libraries, such as the university libraries in our study, the books […]
Creating Our (Fabulous!) Online Exhibition with the University of Edinburgh
The best laid plans… It’s there, listed in our ‘Pathways to Impact’ statement: exhibitions. Back then, before the pandemic, that meant in-person displays of materials relating to the Books and Borrowing project. Borrowing registers or receipt books, selected books from partners’ collections, and featured library users from each library perhaps. We were going to create […]
Featured Borrowers: Sir Gilbert Blane: A Physician
Although borrowings from Gilbert Blane only appear in one of our Books and Borrowing Libraries so far, he may yet be found in more as we begin work on linking our data across our 150,000 or so records collected at time of writing. Born in Ayrshire in 1749, Blane was destined for a career in […]
Featured Borrowers: Mrs Macleod of Cadboll
Books of travel and exploration were popular across our Books and Borrowing Libraries. As Maxine has shown, such books were the favourites of the students of Edinburgh’s Royal High School. Perhaps readers sought adventure and escape or maybe they just liked stories that took them across the world. Travel books were available across our libraries […]
Lending Registers at Glamis Castle, 1699-1754
by Kelsey Jackson Williams, University of Stirling When exploring an old aristocratic library you dream of finding many things – incunables, manuscripts, provenance and marginalia forgotten by the centuries – but what I had not expected on a frozen December afternoon, still scarfed and coated inside, rubbing my hands for warmth as I worked through […]
Supernatural Visions: A Halloween Post
Second Sight Studying the Supernatural An entry showing that George Graham Bell borrowed ‘Aubreys Miscellanies’ from the Advocates Library on 1 January 1823 seems innocuous enough. But dare to open the library catalogue the full title reveals a world of the supernatural: Miscellanies, viz. I. Day-fatality. II. Local-fatality. III. Ostenta. IV. Omens. V. Dreams. VI. […]
Collections Management as Borrowing-record Stand-in in the Australian Subscription Library
By Brittani Ivan, PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University My work is something of a departure from this website’s usual fare, as my primary area of study is an Australian, rather than a Scottish Library: The Australian Subscription Library of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Founded in 1826, the Australian Subscription Library was first self-proclaimed […]
Mrs Felix Yaniewicz and the Chambers’ Circulating Library, 1829
Sometimes the stars seem to align when going research. For Books and Borrowing, the configuration of the arrival and transcription of the Chambers’ Borrowing Register and the identification of one of its borrowers has been almost spooky for me in the case of Mrs Yaniewicz. Mrs Yaniewicz took a ‘New Books’ quarterly subscription from the […]