Author: Kit Baston
A First Look at the University of Edinburgh Library Borrowers’ Receipt Books
We were delighted to report on a milestone on Twitter for our project last month: We have now taken delivery of 9,992 pages from 35 borrowers’ receipt books from @pettigrew_s and the fabulous digitisation team at @CRC_EdUni. All during a global pandemic! We cannot thank them enough! These record the book borrowings of students and […]
7 Pieces of Music to be Arranged: Women Borrowers and the First Female Cataloguer of the St Andrews Copyright Music Collection
Guest post by Dr Karen E McAulay, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland In 1801, the University of St Andrews started binding a backlog of legally deposited sheet music. Music was roughly sorted into volumes for voice, piano or instrumental ensemble; binding became a routine practice over the subsequent three and a half decades. The music was […]
A Painted Literary Parthenon for the Athens of the North
Any keeper of books will know that space is always at a premium and by the late 1790s, two Edinburgh institutional libraries found that they needed more shelves to house their collections. The Faculty of Advocates and the Writers to the Signet came together to create a library complex next to Parliament House. The Signet […]
Seeking the Sublime: Elizabeth Montagu in Scotland, August 1766
Cuchullin sat by Tura’s wall; by the tree of the rustling leaf.—His spear leaned against the mossy rock. His shield lay by him on the grass. As he thought of mighty Carbar a hero whom he slew in war; the scout of the ocean came, Moran the son of Fithil. – Fingal, Book I Elizabeth […]
Books, Borrowing, and the Bannatyne Club
By Kelsey Jackson Williams Not many people today would recognise the Bannatyne Club if you mentioned it in casual conversation, but in 1820s Edinburgh it was a name on everyone’s lips. Branded ‘harder to gain entry to than parliament’, the exclusive society, at first limited to thirty-five members, later to a hundred, had been founded […]
William Hunter’s Library and Legacy: The Hunterian Museum Library
Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) left his collections to his nephew Matthew Baillie who had the use of them with the understanding that they would eventually be given to the University of Glasgow. By the early nineteenth century, Baillie had established his own medical practice and he and his fellow trustees set in motion plans to […]
Illuminating Libraries
A guest post from our partner Linda Cracknell I’d been enchanted with Innerpeffray for a long time, Scotland’s first public lending library set on a bend of the river Earn. It epitomises Scotland’s Enlightenment, and a belief in the power of books to democratise, to illuminate the spirit, and it proved ‘the urge for education […]
Subject Classifications
An important consideration for our Books and Borrowing database is how useful it will be for researchers. Not just us, but anyone who would like to use our data in the future. One question our team has been working on is how to classify the thousands of entries our database will contain. Our original vision […]
John Millar’s Borrowings in Spring 1768: A Preview of the Glasgow Professors Borrowing Registers
I was part of project to transcribe and analyse the University’s student and professorial borrowing registers in 2018 and 2019. The Glasgow project was one of the three pilot projects for ‘Books and Borrowing’, along with transcribing and analysing registers from the Innerpeffray Library and the University of St Andrews. Eighteenth-Century Borrowing from the University […]
Books and Borrowing and the First Scottish Enlightenment, a guest post by Kelsey Jackson Williams
Purchasing a book is, as we all know, very different from reading it. Too often, however, book historians are forced to rely on our knowledge of what books were purchased in the face of an absence of evidence of what books were actually read. This is one of the reasons I find the Books and […]