Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Latest Posts

Early Reflections on Robert Chambers’ Edinburgh Circulating Library

Back in July 2021, Kit Baston announced the exciting news that we’d be adding the records of Robert Chambers’ Edinburgh Circulating Library to the Books and Borrowing project. Our partners at the National Library of Scotland have now completed conservation and digitisation work on the register, and we’ve begun to enter records into our system. […]

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Forgotten Best-Sellers: Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811)

In her blog last week, Katie Halsey introduced the first of a new series within the Books and Borrowing blog: the ‘Forgotten Best-Sellers’. These best-sellers must ‘either top the charts in a single library, or…appear frequently across a large number of different libraries’; they are works that ‘were clearly popular and important in their own […]

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Forgotten Best-Sellers: John Moore’s Zeluco (1789)

In this blog, I am initiating a new thread in our blogposts, which we’re calling ‘Forgotten Best-Sellers’, in homage to Robert Darnton’s great work The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996). While the work of the ‘Books and Borrowing’ project focuses more on what we might more accurately call ‘Most-Borrowed’, rather than ‘Best-Selling’ works, the […]

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Anatomy of a Holding: Robert Burns at the Wigtown Subscription Library

The accounts of the Wigtown Subscription Library in Galloway register a payment of one pound, eleven shillings and sixpence for ‘Burns’s works’ on 22 October 1800, followed by a payment of sixpence for ‘Carriage from Dumfries’ five days later.[1] Cross-reference to the library’s borrowing registers reveal that this text was in four volumes, confirming it […]

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William MacGregor Stirling: Minister, Historian, and Antiquarian

It may seem facile to remark that behind each borrowing record is a borrower. Library records alone often tell us little of their identity. Typically, this may include the price of admission paid by a library borrower, perhaps a signature signed into the subscription book, or details of their occupation or address. For most library […]

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Looking Forward to 2022

The Books and Borrowing team have now returned to work after the holidays – in the first half of 2022, we’re entering a crucial stage of the project as we build out the materials we have in the system, cover the libraries we have yet to engage with in detail, conduct contextualisation and normalisation, and […]

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The Midway Point

We are now at the midway point of the Books and Borrowing project! We are eighteen months in, with eighteen left to go. It seemed, therefore, a good time to stop and reflect on what we have achieved so far, and what remains to be done. I want to begin this reflection with some personal […]

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A Signet Library Tour for the Books and Borrowing Team

The Books and Borrowing team was recently treated to a private tour of the Signet Library by our very own Kit Baston! Kit has worked with and alongside the library and archives for years, so there was no better person to show us around. Located behind St Giles Cathedral, just off the Royal Mile, the […]

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Christmas in Kirkwall

As the festive season approaches, I thought I would write something to get us all in the mood for Christmas. This time last year, I looked at Christmas borrowings at the Library of Innerpeffray. This year, I’m going to be focussing on the Orkney Library, and reporting on what borrowers were returning to the library […]

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Individual Readers at the Royal High School

One of my favourite things about working with library borrowers’ records is getting to know the individual quirks and tastes of specific borrowers. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the borrowing habits of the boys at the Royal High School began to diversify. Prior to this, a large majority visited the library to borrow […]

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