Latest Posts
The World in Print: Borrowings of Voyages and Travels
Voyages and travels were among the most borrowed books from Scottish libraries in the eighteenth century and Romantic era. Travel narratives and works of geographical description could encompass an almost limitless range of subjects, reflecting a period that was characterised by colonisation and war, as well as a burgeoning interest in natural history, antiquity, and […]
William Hunter’s Library and Legacy: The Hunterian Museum Library
Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) left his collections to his nephew Matthew Baillie who had the use of them with the understanding that they would eventually be given to the University of Glasgow. By the early nineteenth century, Baillie had established his own medical practice and he and his fellow trustees set in motion plans to […]
Illuminating Libraries
A guest post from our partner Linda Cracknell I’d been enchanted with Innerpeffray for a long time, Scotland’s first public lending library set on a bend of the river Earn. It epitomises Scotland’s Enlightenment, and a belief in the power of books to democratise, to illuminate the spirit, and it proved ‘the urge for education […]
Types of Libraries
A prevailing theme seems to be appearing on this blog, which is about our interest in categorisation and classification! Along with thinking through how to categorise both books and borrowers, we’ve also needed to do some reflecting on how to classify the types of libraries involved in our study. Our initial breakdown of the libraries […]
Visitors at Innerpeffray Library: J.M Barrie, George Bernard Shaw and Adam White
Exploring the history of reading, libraries, and historical tourism, I am one of the new researchers on the Books and Borrowing project, undertaking my PhD with Innerpeffray Library and the University of Stirling. My work continues the story of Innerpeffray Library from another PhD thesis published in 2018, looking into how the library was used […]
Political Readers and the Associational Reading Space: Starting a PhD on Library Records
by Josh Smith Recovering evidence of historical reading can often be a fraught endeavour for the historical researcher as the purpose and act of reading remains intrinsically personal to the individual reader. Yet library borrowing records are one of the clearest sources available to those assessing which printed publications historical audiences engaged with. Of course, […]
Subject Classifications
An important consideration for our Books and Borrowing database is how useful it will be for researchers. Not just us, but anyone who would like to use our data in the future. One question our team has been working on is how to classify the thousands of entries our database will contain. Our original vision […]
Broughton House Visit
Broughton House in the coastal town of Kirkcudbright is the former home of the colourist painter Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933), who was part of the ‘Glasgow Boys’ circle. This beautiful Georgian townhouse, which once belonged to Alexander Murray (c.1680-1750), Provost of Kirkcudbright and formerly a local MP, is now a museum managed by the National […]
A year at Westerkirk
Back in July, I wrote about my trip to the evocative Westerkirk Parish Library in Dumfriesshire to photograph materials for the Books and Borrowing project. The process of adding records from the library’s manuscript borrowing register (styled the ‘Kalendar’ by its users) into the database is now well underway, and I recently passed a minor […]
John Millar’s Borrowings in Spring 1768: A Preview of the Glasgow Professors Borrowing Registers
I was part of project to transcribe and analyse the University’s student and professorial borrowing registers in 2018 and 2019. The Glasgow project was one of the three pilot projects for ‘Books and Borrowing’, along with transcribing and analysing registers from the Innerpeffray Library and the University of St Andrews. Eighteenth-Century Borrowing from the University […]