Latest Posts
Wild Words and Spooky Happenstance: A Festival Diary
Republished with permission from The Library of Innerpeffray Blog From Thursday 7 to Sunday 10 September 2023, Innerpeffray Library hosted its third annual Festival of Reading, celebrating the theme of Wild Words. Authors, poets, storytellers, musicians, artists, and readers met in and around the historic location of Scotland’s first free lending library. On Thursday evening, […]
Hallowe’en Reading
Happy Spooky Season to all our loyal readers! Having just come back from the USA, where Hallowe’en is everywhere throughout October, I thought I would see what kinds of spooky reading events I could find in our dataset. A quick keyword search in our new digital resource (soon to be fully open to the public!) […]
Penned in the Margins
One of the things that the Books and Borrowing database allows us to do is find out which library holdings were heavily used in the period the project covers, determine whether books still remain in collections and then see if any evidence of use survives between their covers. We’ve not yet had the chance to […]
Ted Powell Lecture at Innerpeffray
On 4th October I had the honour of giving the Ted Powell Memorial Lecture to the Friends of Innerpeffray Library. Ted Powell was a former librarian at Innerpeffray, and I was delighted to discover from his widow after the talk that he had been a great advocate of the Innerpeffray’s borrowers’ registers, and regularly urged […]
Thomas Jefferson and the ‘extensive good’ of the Subscription Library
As regular readers of the Books and Borrowing blog will know, I spent three months of my summer as a visiting scholar at the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS) at Monticello, kindly funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. During my time in the United States, I was fortunate enough to […]
A (Belated) Happy Birthday to Mungo Park!
Born on the 10th of September, 1771, we had hoped to wish Scottish explorer and surgeon, Mungo Park, a happy birthday on the 252nd anniversary of his birth last month. However, while observing the digital picket of the recent UCU strike action, we decided to wish him a belated happy birthday today instead! […]
Libraries and Class Identity in Scotland, 1800-1842: A PhD
I’m back – and this time for the long haul! Books and Borrowing is a project that I’ve greatly enjoyed being involved with since receiving a Carnegie Vacation Scholarship in summer 2020, which enabled me to conduct three months of research with the project team (you can read about this research here, here, and here). […]
Digital Picket
We are observing the strike actions called by the University and College Union (UCU) and respecting the digital picket. Our blogs will return October. The UCU website has more information about the strike actions.
Forgotten Best-Sellers: ‘Bell’s Surgery’
‘Bell’s Surgery’, or, to give it its proper title, A System of Surgery, was published in its first edition in six volumes between 1783 and 1788. It was a popular textbook that became what Richard Sher describes as a ‘strong seller’[1] with seven editions in print by 1801. Its influence went beyond its sales figures. […]
Forgotten Best-Sellers: Elizabeth Hamilton’s The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808)
In 1808, Scottish author Elizabeth Hamilton published her third and final novel, titled The Cottagers of Glenburnie. As Pam Perkins observes in her introduction to what is currently the only extant scholarly edition of this novel, Cottagers became ‘when it was first published […] an immediate critical and popular success’.[1] It is with this success […]