Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Books and Borrowing: Edinburgh’s 19th Century Readers – Online Event with NLS

In conjunction with our partners at the National Library of Scotland, we’re pleased to announce the upcoming online event, ‘Books and Borrowing: Edinburgh’s 19th Century Readers’, which will take place from 5.00-6.00pm on Thursday 23 June, 2022.

This event is free, and we invite you to book your place through Eventbrite.

Copyright Chambers family. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence’

Join the Books and Borrowing team as we discuss the rich array of books, borrowers and libraries whose stories survive in records from across Scotland. We’ll focus in particular on those from Edinburgh, including those of Robert Chambers’s Circulating Library, and the Advocates Library, both held by the National Library of Scotland. The Chambers register is thought to be the only surviving record of borrowings from a library of its type, making it a unique window into the reading habits of ninenteenth-century Edinburgh.

This event forms part of a collaborative project with the National Library of Scotland, which aims to transcribe the borrowing records of Robert Chambers’s Edinburgh Circulating Library, and introduce this exceptionally rare piece of reading history to a wider audience.

The NLS have played an invaluable role in conserving, digitising, and securing permissions for the use of the Chambers Register, and we’re grateful to them for hosting this event on Edinburgh’s 19th Century Readers as part of their regular webinar series.

We look forward to seeing you on 23 June!