Latest Posts
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, 2025
Today, 7th March, 2025, 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 […]
The Bancroft Chronicles
In November, I was lucky enough to spend a month working as a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of my PhD. Whilst there, I spent some time at the Bancroft Library, which is home to the University’s special collections. Established in 1859, the Bancroft Library (pictured […]
The Maga, Murder, and Immanuel Kant: Thomas De Quincey and the Advocates Library
Gloucester Place is an attractive Georgian terrace at the northern edge of the New Town just before the streets drop down to Stockbridge. It’s the sort of street that makes me wish for a large lottery win. At No. 6 is a chic boutique hotel with a restaurant and bar called ‘Blackwoods’. A verdigris plaque […]
Visitor Vignettes: Nicknames
Reposted with permission from the Innerpeffray Library Blog Today’s blog on the use of nicknames in the Innerpeffray visitors’ books is inspired by a recent discovery of a 1965 visitor to Innerpeffray, who signed their entry ‘Littel Elf’! In the Innerpeffray visitors’ book of September 1965, there are a series of entries by the Hall […]
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 […]
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, […]
Hallowe’en Reading
Happy Spooky Season to all our loyal readers! Having just come back from the USA, where Hallowe’en is everywhere throughout October, I thought I would see what kinds of spooky reading events I could find in our dataset. A quick keyword search in our new digital resource (soon to be fully open to the public!) […]