Category: Project News
A Year of Books and Borrowing
It’s been a shamefully long time since I updated readers of this blog on things that have been happening on the Books and Borrowing front. This is mainly because it’s been an exceptionally busy year on many fronts, and, now that our funding from the AHRC is at an end, blogging has taken a back […]
Book Borrowing Surgeons: A Jean Guild Grant from the Old Edinburgh Club
I am delighted to share that I have been awarded a Jean Guild Grant from the Old Edinburgh Club (OEC) for a project to continue the work of Books and Borrowing. I am grateful to the OEC for their support and to the Books & Borrowing Team for their enthusiasm for this new follow-on project. […]
EDITION Spring Lecture 2025
Katherine Halsey (Professor of English Studies, University of Stirling) and Matthew Sangster (Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History, University of Glasgow): ‘Towards a True History of Reading Lives: Borrowing in Scotland, 1747-1837’ Chair: Professor Penny Fielding 16:00-17:30, Friday 21 March, Project Room (1.06), 50 George Square, University of Edinburgh Followed by a drinks […]
Time to Celebrate! Report on Books and Borrowing Launch Event
Friday 26th April saw the long-awaited launch of the Books and Borrowing database! Almost all the project team were able to be there, and we very much enjoyed catching up with Alex and Gerry, who have been working elsewhere for the past couple of years, as well as getting the chance to show off our […]
Books and Borrowing Database Launch Event – Friday 26th April, 4pm – University of Glasgow
Dearest Blog Readers, We are delighted to invite you to celebrate the launch of the ‘Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830’ database, which (as you doubtless know if you’re reading this post) archives and interprets borrowing records covering eighteen different Scottish libraries active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using formerly unexplored (or underexplored) registers, […]
World Book Day, 2024
Today, 7th March, 2024, is World Book Day! It seemed like a good moment, therefore, for a Books and Borrowing blog, which I’m going to use to update all of our loyal readers on some of the things that have been happening in the past couple of months. The first piece of news is that, […]
Books and Borrowing: A Retrospective
At this time of year, I normally write a blog based on Christmas borrowings from one of more of the libraries represented in the Books and Borrowing dataset. This year, however, I need to write something different. Astonishingly, we are now in the last few weeks of our funded period, and inching ever closer to […]
Scottish Student Marginalia in the Romantic Period: A PhD
Hello! My name is Rachael Tarrant and I am the latest, and fourth, PhD researcher to join ranks with the Books and Borrowing team (shortly to be followed by Jacqueline next year) – a climbing number that itself testifies to the germinating power of the Books and Borrowing project. My SGSAH AHRC funded PHD, co-supervised […]
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 […]