Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Category: Guest Posts

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 […]

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Collections Management as Borrowing-record Stand-in in the Australian Subscription Library

By Brittani Ivan, PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University My work is something of a departure from this website’s usual fare, as my primary area of study is an Australian, rather than a Scottish Library: The Australian Subscription Library of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Founded in 1826, the Australian Subscription Library was first self-proclaimed […]

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Guest Post – An Overview of Glasgow in the Eighteenth Century

by Dr Craig Lamont, University of Glasgow In April, the Books and Borrowing project examined a swathe of material relating to eighteenth-century Glasgow, with papers on registers, marginalia, the missing lectures of Adam Smith, and the cultural context of William Hunter’s library. To set the scene, I provided an overview of Glasgow in the period, […]

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Guest Post – Event Horizons: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth Century Glasgow

by Christina Devlin, Professor of English and Reading, Montgomery College, Maryland In April, I was a guest at Books and Borrowing’s workshop at Archives and Special Collections at the University of Glasgow. The twelfth-floor view of the Campsie Hills, new to me as a recent transplant to Glasgow, epitomized how the project expands studies of […]

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Guest Post – Institutional Borrowing: Inventories, Registers, Receipt Books

By Dr Dahlia Porter, University of Glasgow [This post is based on a talk I gave at the Books and Borrowing event on 7 April 2022, which was unfortunately interrupted by a power outage!] In this post, I am going to compare book borrowing registers like those being digitized by the Books and Borrowing project […]

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Guest Post – University of Glasgow Library borrowing registers, beyond the borrowing: what additional insights can they provide?

by Robert MacLean, Assistant Librarian in Archives and Special Collections, University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections (ASC) at the University of Glasgow holds the institution’s historical library records, including old catalogues, library committee minutes, acquisition ledgers and the registers recording when books were borrowed and by whom. Until recently these have been rather overlooked […]

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7 Pieces of Music to be Arranged: Women Borrowers and the First Female Cataloguer of the St Andrews Copyright Music Collection

Guest post by Dr Karen E McAulay, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland In 1801, the University of St Andrews started binding a backlog of legally deposited sheet music.  Music was roughly sorted into volumes for voice, piano or instrumental ensemble; binding became a routine practice over the subsequent three and a half decades. The music was […]

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Books, Borrowing, and the Bannatyne Club

By Kelsey Jackson Williams Not many people today would recognise the Bannatyne Club if you mentioned it in casual conversation, but in 1820s Edinburgh it was a name on everyone’s lips.  Branded ‘harder to gain entry to than parliament’, the exclusive society, at first limited to thirty-five members, later to a hundred, had been founded […]

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Illuminating Libraries

A guest post from our partner Linda Cracknell I’d been enchanted with Innerpeffray for a long time, Scotland’s first public lending library set on a bend of the river Earn. It epitomises Scotland’s Enlightenment, and a belief in the power of books to democratise, to illuminate the spirit, and it proved ‘the urge for education […]

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Books and Borrowing and the First Scottish Enlightenment, a guest post by Kelsey Jackson Williams

Purchasing a book is, as we all know, very different from reading it.  Too often, however, book historians are forced to rely on our knowledge of what books were purchased in the face of an absence of evidence of what books were actually read.  This is one of the reasons I find the Books and […]

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