Latest Posts
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 […]
Religious Occupations
Over the past few weeks, one of the things we have been discussing as a team is how to structure data about our borrowers in order to make the eventual search and browse functions as flexible and useful as possible. Our friends at the Libraries, Reading Communities & Cultural Formation in the C18th Atlantic project […]
The Road to Westerkirk
With the tentative lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, I was recently able to conduct my first bit of Books and Borrowing fieldwork since the project officially started in June. Thanks to the generosity of the library Trustees (and with suitable precautions taken) I’ve begun to dig into the rich collections of Westerkirk Parish Library, which lies […]
William Young and his Petition to the Sheriff of Perthshire
During the course of writing an essay on Romantic period readers at the Library of Innerpeffray for a collection entitled Before the Public Library: Reading Community and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850, edited by Mark Towsey and Kyle Roberts, I came across some fascinating archival evidence that provided a wonderful example of the importance […]
Unsung Heroes
In last week’s blog, Brian Aitken wrote about importing existing datasets into our Content Management System. Two of those datasets (for the Selkirk Subscription Library and the John Gray Library at Haddington) were generously donated to the project by Vivienne Dunstan, who transcribed the borrowings and undertook substantial genealogical research on the borrowers, during the […]