Category: Borrowers
The Maga, Murder, and Immanuel Kant: Thomas De Quincey and the Advocates Library
Gloucester Place is an attractive Georgian terrace at the northern edge of the New Town just before the streets drop down to Stockbridge. It’s the sort of street that makes me wish for a large lottery win. At No. 6 is a chic boutique hotel with a restaurant and bar called ‘Blackwoods’. A verdigris plaque […]
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!) […]
Penned in the Margins
One of the things that the Books and Borrowing database allows us to do is find out which library holdings were heavily used in the period the project covers, determine whether books still remain in collections and then see if any evidence of use survives between their covers. We’ve not yet had the chance to […]
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 […]
A (Belated) Happy Birthday to Mungo Park!
Born on the 10th of September, 1771, we had hoped to wish Scottish explorer and surgeon, Mungo Park, a happy birthday on the 252nd anniversary of his birth last month. However, while observing the digital picket of the recent UCU strike action, we decided to wish him a belated happy birthday today instead! […]
Visiting the Advocates Library in the 18th Century
We are fortunate that some of our Books and Borrowing libraries survive in forms our eighteenth and nineteenth century borrowers would recognise. The books of Innerpeffray Library and the Leighton Library still live in their original homes of 1762 and 1687 respectively. For other libraries, such as the university libraries in our study, the books […]
Featured Borrowers: Sir Gilbert Blane: A Physician
Although borrowings from Gilbert Blane only appear in one of our Books and Borrowing Libraries so far, he may yet be found in more as we begin work on linking our data across our 150,000 or so records collected at time of writing. Born in Ayrshire in 1749, Blane was destined for a career in […]
Featured Borrowers: Mrs Macleod of Cadboll
Books of travel and exploration were popular across our Books and Borrowing Libraries. As Maxine has shown, such books were the favourites of the students of Edinburgh’s Royal High School. Perhaps readers sought adventure and escape or maybe they just liked stories that took them across the world. Travel books were available across our libraries […]
Lending Registers at Glamis Castle, 1699-1754
by Kelsey Jackson Williams, University of Stirling When exploring an old aristocratic library you dream of finding many things – incunables, manuscripts, provenance and marginalia forgotten by the centuries – but what I had not expected on a frozen December afternoon, still scarfed and coated inside, rubbing my hands for warmth as I worked through […]
Bruce, the Bible, and a Borrowing: James Bruce of Kinnaird and the Leighton Library, Dunblane
Working with historical borrowing records provides you with a host of names. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the challenges of researching the biographical details of our library borrowers. In the modern age of scholarly research, the first step in such an endeavour is often a trusty web search in the hope of […]