Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Author: Katie Halsey

World Book Day, 2025

Today, 7th March, 2025, is World Book Day! It seemed like a good moment, therefore, for a Books and Borrowing blog, which I’m going to use to update all of our loyal readers on some of the things that have been happening in the past couple of months. The first piece of news is that, […]

Read more

Books and Borrowing: A Retrospective

At this time of year, I normally write a blog based on Christmas borrowings from one of more of the libraries represented in the Books and Borrowing dataset. This year, however, I need to write something different. Astonishingly, we are now in the last few weeks of our funded period, and inching ever closer to […]

Read more

Hallowe’en Reading

Happy Spooky Season to all our loyal readers! Having just come back from the USA, where Hallowe’en is everywhere throughout October, I thought I would see what kinds of spooky reading events I could find in our dataset. A quick keyword search in our new digital resource (soon to be fully open to the public!) […]

Read more

Ted Powell Lecture at Innerpeffray

On 4th October I had the honour of giving the Ted Powell Memorial Lecture to the Friends of Innerpeffray Library. Ted Powell was a former librarian at Innerpeffray, and I was delighted to discover from his widow after the talk that he had been a great advocate of the Innerpeffray’s borrowers’ registers, and regularly urged […]

Read more

Stirling’s Historic Libraries

Here at the University of Stirling, we have been thinking about ways in which we might contribute to the celebrations for the 900th anniversary of Stirling burgh, and a colleague asked me to talk about Stirling’s historic libraries. Regular readers of this blog will know that none of the libraries featured in the Books and […]

Read more

Forgotten Bestsellers: George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1749-88)

In our series on Forgotten Bestsellers, we have tended so far to focus on works of fiction, which I fear may perhaps have given loyal readers a slightly false impression of the genres most often borrowed from our libraries. In fact, although fiction does become very popular in the early nineteenth century, it is not […]

Read more

Five Go On A Writing Retreat

Last week several members of the Books and Borrowing team (Matt, Katie, Josh, Cleo and Maxine) attended the University of Stirling’s annual Eighteenth-Century Writing Group Writing Retreat in the lovely surroundings of Alexander House, Auchterarder. We all used the time to make significant progress on writing projects. Collectively, the participants managed a whopping 60,000 words […]

Read more

Libraries, Lives and Legacies Research Festival: Event Report – Part Two (Stirling)

Following on from last week’s blog, in which I reported on the first part of our Libraries Lives and Legacies Research Festival, held in Liverpool and online, this week’s blog will focus on the second of our events, the conference on Reading and Book Circulation 1650-1850, held at the Iris Murdoch Building of the University […]

Read more

Libraries, Lives and Legacies Research Festival: Event Report – Part One (Liverpool and Online)

Regular readers of this blog will know that over the past few months we had been gearing up for our Research Festival on the theme of Libraries, Lives and Legacies, run in partnership with the C18th Libraries Online project at the University of Liverpool. From 13th to 19th April, therefore, we enjoyed an intense week […]

Read more

A Comic Poem Inspired by the Books and Borrowing Project

This week, we are delighted to introduce the last of our Highly Commended entries to the Books and Borrowing Creative Writing Competition: Cara Morsello’s poem ‘Chambers’ Library – A Dangerous Place’ © Cara Morsello. Please do not publish or reproduce this poem without the author’s permission. Cara Morsello Royal is a recovering lawyer. Since her […]

Read more