Latest Posts
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 […]
Eighteenth-Century Borrowing from the University of Glasgow
One of the pilot projects for ‘Books and Borrowing’ was ‘Enlightenment Readers in the Scottish Universities’, which was funded by a Research Incentive grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and a grant from the University of Glasgow’s Chancellor’s Fund. This project was conducted by three of the Books and Borrowing team […]
Craigston Castle Borrowers’ Register
Very exciting news this week – we are adding another library to our project! We are very grateful to be able to include the loans register of Craigston Castle, in Turriff, Aberdeenshire by kind permission of William Urquhart, the current laird. Warm thanks are due also to Sandra Cumming, who is joining the project as […]
Water Drinkers at Leighton Library
Returning to the archives felt like a very exciting moment! I spent two days photographing the manuscript registers of the Leighton Library, now held at the University of Stirling Archives. Details of the Leighton Collection, including transcriptions of three MS catalogues, are available online. The Leighton Library (or Biblioteca Leightoniana) was founded on the collection […]
The (Huge!) Borrowing Records of St Andrews
One of the most interesting aspects of the ‘Books and Borrowing’ project is the diversity of the libraries we are dealing with. Our fourteen (soon, perhaps, to be fifteen – watch this space!) target libraries with surviving borrowing registers range from community institutions in small towns to major collections based at the ancient universities. This […]
Books and Borrowing and the First Scottish Enlightenment, a guest post by Kelsey Jackson Williams
Purchasing a book is, as we all know, very different from reading it. Too often, however, book historians are forced to rely on our knowledge of what books were purchased in the face of an absence of evidence of what books were actually read. This is one of the reasons I find the Books and […]
Leadhills Heritage Trust
Surfing the Yesterday channel a few days ago, I was surprised and delighted to spot a familiar figure on the Antiques Roadshow! The roadshow was taking place at New Lanark in 2017, and John Crawford, member of our Advisory Board, and Chair of Leadhills Heritage Trust, had taken in a banner from Leadhills Miners’ Library. […]
Book: Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831
Having now officially come on board with ‘Books and Borrowing’ (hooray!) and by way of introduction, I’d like to use this first blog post to say a few words about my recently published monograph and how it relates to the project research. While our team collectively works to gather, process and analyse historic borrowing data […]