Author: Katie Halsey
All Together Now: Reflections on the ECSSS and BARS/NASSR conferences
It’s conference season in the academic world, and the ‘Books and Borrowing’ team were delighted to attend two conferences back to back! Despite train and bus strikes, we made it to Liverpool to attend the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society (ECSSS) conference on the theme of ‘Scots Abroad’ at the University of Liverpool. We then moved […]
Forgotten Best-Sellers: Alain-René Lesage, Gil Blas (1715-35)
Over the past few weeks, prompted by seeing a copy of it in Walter Scott’s library during our trip to Abbotsford, I have been enjoying reading another forgotten best-seller, Alain-René Lesage’s L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane. I’ve been reading it in the 1748 translation by Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, […]
Eighteenth-Century Studies at Stirling Writing Retreat
From 23-27 May 2022, several members of the Books and Borrowing team (Katie, Gerry, Maxine, Cleo, Josh, and Danni) participated in the Eighteenth-Century Studies at Stirling Writing Retreat at the beautiful Alexander House in rural Perthshire. Fifteen scholars came together to write and to support each other in that endeavour. The idea of the retreat […]
Poetry: A Reflection
21 March 2022 was World Poetry Day. The Books and Borrowing team were either observing the strike action called by the University and College Union (UCU), or respecting the digital picket line, so we did not post a blog that day (for those interested in this dispute, please see here). However, I didn’t want to […]
International Women’s Day 2022
Today, 8 March, 2022 is International Women’s Day, and I’m therefore going to take the opportunity to reflect a little, both on the women writers and readers we find in our borrowing records, as I did last year and also on those we don’t see – the wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, friends, and […]
Forgotten Best-Sellers: John Moore’s Zeluco (1789)
In this blog, I am initiating a new thread in our blogposts, which we’re calling ‘Forgotten Best-Sellers’, in homage to Robert Darnton’s great work The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996). While the work of the ‘Books and Borrowing’ project focuses more on what we might more accurately call ‘Most-Borrowed’, rather than ‘Best-Selling’ works, the […]
The Midway Point
We are now at the midway point of the Books and Borrowing project! We are eighteen months in, with eighteen left to go. It seemed, therefore, a good time to stop and reflect on what we have achieved so far, and what remains to be done. I want to begin this reflection with some personal […]
Christmas in Kirkwall
As the festive season approaches, I thought I would write something to get us all in the mood for Christmas. This time last year, I looked at Christmas borrowings at the Library of Innerpeffray. This year, I’m going to be focussing on the Orkney Library, and reporting on what borrowers were returning to the library […]
Romantic-Period Book Circulation
I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of a salon – and the women who ran salons in the eighteenth century, such as Madame Geoffrin, Mlle de Scudéry, Madame de Staël, and Madame Necker in France, and Elizabeth Montague, Mary Berry, Lady Holland, and the Countess of Blessington on this side of the English Channel. […]
In Memoriam William St Clair
The Books and Borrowing team were all saddened to hear of the recent death of William St Clair. In what follows, three of us reflect on his enduring legacy. Matthew Sangster writes: I have a very clear memory of first reading The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period on a train in the Scottish Highlands. […]