Category: Books
Christmas Borrowing!
As this will be our last blog before Christmas, due to the closure of both Universities over the holiday season, I thought it might be interesting to think a little about winter borrowings. An interesting finding that seems to hold true across the analysis we have thus far been able to do, is that throughout […]
Rebellion, Enlightenment and Rollin
The commonplace narratives of Scottish history tell us that, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, the nation was reckoning with the aftermath of an unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion and laying the groundwork for an economic boom that, by the 1780s, would have transformed Scotland into a modern imperial power. This era was accompanied by a […]
The World in Print: Borrowings of Voyages and Travels
Voyages and travels were among the most borrowed books from Scottish libraries in the eighteenth century and Romantic era. Travel narratives and works of geographical description could encompass an almost limitless range of subjects, reflecting a period that was characterised by colonisation and war, as well as a burgeoning interest in natural history, antiquity, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Eighteenth-Century Borrowing from the University of Glasgow
One of the pilot projects for ‘Books and Borrowing’ was ‘Enlightenment Readers in the Scottish Universities’, which was funded by a Research Incentive grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and a grant from the University of Glasgow’s Chancellor’s Fund. This project was conducted by three of the Books and Borrowing team […]