Category: Partners
Library Lives: Books, Borrowers, and Beyond: Innerpeffray Library, Saturday 22 May
The Books and Borrowing Project is pleased to announce the project’s first public event, to be held at the famous Innerpeffray Library on 22nd May at 2pm. This free online event will highlight Innerpeffray’s unique Borrowers’ Register and the stories it can tell about the library’s books and borrowers. Come along to find out about […]
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 […]
Scottish Libraries and the Associational World
‘Ours is the age of societies. For the redress of every oppression that is done under the sun, there is a public meeting. For the cure of every sorrow by which our land or our race can be visited, there are patrons, vice-presidents, and secretaries. For the diffusion of every blessing of which mankind can […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Visitors at Innerpeffray Library: J.M Barrie, George Bernard Shaw and Adam White
Exploring the history of reading, libraries, and historical tourism, I am one of the new researchers on the Books and Borrowing project, undertaking my PhD with Innerpeffray Library and the University of Stirling. My work continues the story of Innerpeffray Library from another PhD thesis published in 2018, looking into how the library was used […]
Craigston Castle Borrowers’ Register
Very exciting news this week – we are adding another library to our project! We are very grateful to be able to include the loans register of Craigston Castle, in Turriff, Aberdeenshire by kind permission of William Urquhart, the current laird. Warm thanks are due also to Sandra Cumming, who is joining the project as […]
Water Drinkers at Leighton Library
Returning to the archives felt like a very exciting moment! I spent two days photographing the manuscript registers of the Leighton Library, now held at the University of Stirling Archives. Details of the Leighton Collection, including transcriptions of three MS catalogues, are available online. The Leighton Library (or Biblioteca Leightoniana) was founded on the collection […]