Latest Posts
Walter Scott at Innerpeffray: Read to Death
Innerpeffray Library has now re-opened to visitors! After a longer than usual winter closure period due to lockdown and Covid-19 restrictions, you can once again travel to rural Perthshire and see the first free public library in Scotland – and its new exhibition. Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, ‘Read […]
Event Report: Library Lives at Innerpeffray
On Saturday 22nd May we held the first of several project events intended to bring our work with Scotland’s historical borrowing records to a wider public. Entitled Library Lives: Books, Borrowing and Beyond, the event was co-hosted by our project partners at Innerpeffray Library, and offered two hours of short talks and live research on […]
Life Cycles and Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality
In each of our weekly meetings for Books and Borrowing, we talk a bit about what we’ve been noticing in the registers – strange anomalies, popular books, quirks of record-keeping practices and so on. Sometimes the popular books becoming apparent from the data we’re transcribing are relatively predictable: for example, the works of Charles Rollin […]
A First Look at the University of Edinburgh Library Borrowers’ Receipt Books
We were delighted to report on a milestone on Twitter for our project last month: We have now taken delivery of 9,992 pages from 35 borrowers’ receipt books from @pettigrew_s and the fabulous digitisation team at @CRC_EdUni. All during a global pandemic! We cannot thank them enough! These record the book borrowings of students and […]
The Archives Re-Open: Planning for Research in the Orkney Archives
News that archives and libraries are now able to re-open has been enormously welcome to the whole project team as we start to plan our research over the summer and for the remainder of this year. I am particularly excited to be planning a long-delayed and long-anticipated trip up to the Orkney Archives in Kirkwall […]
The Koran that Wasn’t: A Cataloguing Adventure from Craigston Castle
Craigston Castle’s ‘Koran’ is far from spectacular but as is so often the case with older books, appearances are deceptive. This well-worn volume has so many stories to tell both of its path to Craigston and its life since then. About the former we have some tantalising details but much is yet to be known. […]
7 Pieces of Music to be Arranged: Women Borrowers and the First Female Cataloguer of the St Andrews Copyright Music Collection
Guest post by Dr Karen E McAulay, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland In 1801, the University of St Andrews started binding a backlog of legally deposited sheet music. Music was roughly sorted into volumes for voice, piano or instrumental ensemble; binding became a routine practice over the subsequent three and a half decades. The music was […]
Programme: Library Lives: Books, Borrowing and Beyond, 2.00-4.00pm, Saturday 22nd May
An online event hosted by Innerpeffray Library 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 […]
A Painted Literary Parthenon for the Athens of the North
Any keeper of books will know that space is always at a premium and by the late 1790s, two Edinburgh institutional libraries found that they needed more shelves to house their collections. The Faculty of Advocates and the Writers to the Signet came together to create a library complex next to Parliament House. The Signet […]
Women Borrowers at Westerkirk Library
To mark Women’s History Month, we’re running a series of blogs to highlight the women who wrote and borrowed the books found in our libraries. Today, I’m returning to Westerkirk Library in Dumfriesshire, where a small but active cohort of women members made over 250 borrowings between 1813 and 1818. Eight of the 120 borrowers […]