Category: Books
Forgotten Best-Sellers: Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811)
In her blog last week, Katie Halsey introduced the first of a new series within the Books and Borrowing blog: the ‘Forgotten Best-Sellers’. These best-sellers must ‘either top the charts in a single library, or…appear frequently across a large number of different libraries’; they are works that ‘were clearly popular and important in their own […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A First Look at the Advocates Library
We have now taken delivery of a first set of images from the borrowers’ receipt books of the Advocates Library with the permission of our partners the Faculty of Advocates and via the digitisation skills of our partners the National Library of Scotland. Our Digital Humanities Research Officer Brian Aitken has loaded these to our […]
Numbers, Focus and Prioritisation
Over the last few weeks, the Books and Borrowing team have been working on a problem of which we were aware at the outset of the project, but one that has grown in prominence as we’ve discovered more library records and added further institutions to our list while conducting our research. Our target is to […]
William Robertson (1721-1793): Minister, Principal, Historian
This year marks the tercentenary of the birth of a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. William Robertson was a leading moderate minister of the Church of Scotland, Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1762 until 1793, and a famous author of historical works. Robertson’s three major historical works, The History of Scotland (2 […]
A Comparison of the Borrowings of Different Classes at the Library of Innerpeffray, John Gray Library, Haddington, and Selkirk Subscription Library
In my last blog post, I discussed the Library of Innerpeffray’s exceptional labouring-class borrowing demographic. Labouring-class people were the driving force for borrowings at Innerpeffray as early as the eighteenth century, contradicting narratives claiming that they only began accessing libraries in the nineteenth century, with access previously exclusive to scholarly, aristocratic, and professional elites. The […]
Agricultural Improvement at Westerkirk Library
One of the fascinating things about working on the records of Westerkirk Parish Library has been watching the way its borrowing records reflect a gradual transition from a miners’ library in the 1790s, to a rural subscription library by the 1810s. This long-term shift is suggested by descriptions of Westerkirk parish and its library in […]
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 […]