Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Category: Holdings

The Final Year: What Goes In?

The end of Year 2 is an odd time for a project like this.  We can, I think, rightly be proud of where we’ve got to despite pandemic circumstances, with over 125,000 records currently in the system.  This meets our benchmark and puts us on course to reach our target of 150,000 records by the […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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A First Look at the Aberdeen Theological Library

In 1826, the first of a series of royal commissions was established that would report on the condition and management of the Scottish universities at intervals in the nineteenth century. The range of materials gathered by the commissioners today provide historians with an extraordinary insight into the evolution of Scottish education, including the operation of […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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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 […]

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Broughton House Visit

Broughton House in the coastal town of Kirkcudbright is the former home of the colourist painter Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933), who was part of the ‘Glasgow Boys’ circle. This beautiful Georgian townhouse, which once belonged to Alexander Murray (c.1680-1750), Provost of Kirkcudbright and formerly a local MP, is now a museum managed by the National […]

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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 […]

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