Category: Books
Return from Orkney
Like Harriot Byron, I ask, what am I to do with my gratitude? I can do nothing but thank you and go on.[1] In this quotation, Jane Austen quotes Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison to thank her sister Cassandra for her kindness in sending a long letter. I, too, wish to record my gratitude for the […]
The Most Borrowed Books of the Leighton Library’s Water Drinkers
by Jacqueline Kennard I’m thrilled about my temporary placement with Books and Borrowing and to be writing my first blog post! Funded by the Carnegie Trust’s Undergraduate Vacation Scholarship, I’ll be spending twelve weeks comparing and analysing early-nineteenth-century book borrowings from five libraries in provincial Scotland, namely the Leighton Library, St Andrews University Library, the […]
Walter Scott at Innerpeffray: Read to Death
Innerpeffray Library has now re-opened to visitors! After a longer than usual winter closure period due to lockdown and Covid-19 restrictions, you can once again travel to rural Perthshire and see the first free public library in Scotland – and its new exhibition. Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, ‘Read […]
Life Cycles and Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality
In each of our weekly meetings for Books and Borrowing, we talk a bit about what we’ve been noticing in the registers – strange anomalies, popular books, quirks of record-keeping practices and so on. Sometimes the popular books becoming apparent from the data we’re transcribing are relatively predictable: for example, the works of Charles Rollin […]
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 […]
The Koran that Wasn’t: A Cataloguing Adventure from Craigston Castle
Craigston Castle’s ‘Koran’ is far from spectacular but as is so often the case with older books, appearances are deceptive. This well-worn volume has so many stories to tell both of its path to Craigston and its life since then. About the former we have some tantalising details but much is yet to be known. […]
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 […]
World Book Day with Books and Borrowing
Today, Thursday 4 March 2021, we celebrate World Book Day with a look at some of the favourite books in our partner libraries’ records. In some of our previous blogs, Alex Deans wrote about the popularity of Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810) at Westerkirk Miners’ Library in the period 1813 to 1816, Gerard McKeever […]
Jane Porter and the Historical Novel before Waverley
“The war which had desolated Scotland was now at an end. Ambition seemed satiated; and the vanquished, after passing under the yoke of their enemy, concluded they might wear their chains in peace. Such were the hopes of those Scottish noblemen who, early in the spring of 1296, signed the bond of submission to a […]
Books for Borrowing: Walter Scott
Walter Scott’s novels typically feature at least one central character who has been conspicuously shaped by their reading and/or by experiences of oral storytelling. These characters present a natural avatar for the reader and also stand in for the author himself. There are versions of this in Scott’s earlier metrical romances, but the prototypical example […]