Category: Libraries
Vino and Venison: Kendal’s Reading Associations in the Eighteenth Century
Although all the libraries in the Books and Borrowing database are Scottish, just across the border, the northwest of England was also home to a thriving and active network of print associations. In Westmorland, located in present-day south Cumbria, by the early nineteenth century this included libraries, booksellers, book clubs and reading rooms. Although much […]
Wild Words and Spooky Happenstance: A Festival Diary
Republished with permission from The Library of Innerpeffray Blog From Thursday 7 to Sunday 10 September 2023, Innerpeffray Library hosted its third annual Festival of Reading, celebrating the theme of Wild Words. Authors, poets, storytellers, musicians, artists, and readers met in and around the historic location of Scotland’s first free lending library. On Thursday evening, […]
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 […]
Thomas Jefferson and the ‘extensive good’ of the Subscription Library
As regular readers of the Books and Borrowing blog will know, I spent three months of my summer as a visiting scholar at the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS) at Monticello, kindly funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. During my time in the United States, I was fortunate enough to […]
Stirling’s Historic Libraries
Here at the University of Stirling, we have been thinking about ways in which we might contribute to the celebrations for the 900th anniversary of Stirling burgh, and a colleague asked me to talk about Stirling’s historic libraries. Regular readers of this blog will know that none of the libraries featured in the Books and […]
On the Streets of Philadelphia: Annotations and Marginalia in a Philadelphian Political Pamphlet
Fittingly, my brief tour of American subscription libraries finished where it all began, in Philadelphia and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Founded in 1731, it is America’s oldest subscription library and cultural institution. Foremost amongst the Library Company’s founders was the polymath, and future Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin. Together, Franklin and forty-nine fellow shareholders chose […]
An Englishman in New York: A visit to Manhattan and the New York Society Library
Continuing my tour of American subscription libraries, I left Charleston and flew almost 650 miles north to New York and LaGuardia Airport. New York City is a true cornucopia of libraries, ranging from the magnificence that is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of New York Public Library, to the equally impressive Morgan Library & Museum, […]
I’d Rather Charleston: A Trip to South Carolina and the Charleston Library Society
Last year, I was lucky enough to be awarded a SGSAH visiting researcher grant to fund a three-month placement at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello in Virginia. Whilst I’ll spend the majority of my time in Charlottesville, the nearest city to Monticello, I’m also taking advantage of being ‘stateside’ by making a […]
A Library Tour of Manchester
Reposted with permission from the Innerpeffray Library blog Back in December 2022, I headed to Manchester for a whirlwind day tour of some of its prestigious libraries! On the day I was lucky enough to take part in a tour of Chetham’s Library and spend a little time researching at the Portico Library. Unfortunately I […]
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 […]