Latest Posts
Featured Borrowers: Sir Gilbert Blane: A Physician
Although borrowings from Gilbert Blane only appear in one of our Books and Borrowing Libraries so far, he may yet be found in more as we begin work on linking our data across our 150,000 or so records collected at time of writing. Born in Ayrshire in 1749, Blane was destined for a career in […]
Featured Borrowers: Mrs Macleod of Cadboll
Books of travel and exploration were popular across our Books and Borrowing Libraries. As Maxine has shown, such books were the favourites of the students of Edinburgh’s Royal High School. Perhaps readers sought adventure and escape or maybe they just liked stories that took them across the world. Travel books were available across our libraries […]
Lending Registers at Glamis Castle, 1699-1754
by Kelsey Jackson Williams, University of Stirling When exploring an old aristocratic library you dream of finding many things – incunables, manuscripts, provenance and marginalia forgotten by the centuries – but what I had not expected on a frozen December afternoon, still scarfed and coated inside, rubbing my hands for warmth as I worked through […]
Final Year…
It doesn’t feel like Books and Borrowing has been running for two-and-a-half years, but this is nevertheless the case, and as we enter 2023, we’re now beginning the final year of the project in its current form. We will have somewhat more time than we thought back in June 2020, as the AHRC has kindly […]
Homecoming, Return and Recovery: The BSECS conference, 2023
Happy New Year! Can it really be 2023 already? The New Year got off to a good start for two members of the ‘Books and Borrowing’ team – Josh and I had a great time attending the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) Conference, held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, from 4-6 January. Appropriately, given […]
A Merry Christmas Post for 2022
Normally, in my now-traditional Christmas blog post, I reflect on Christmas borrowing in one or more of our libraries. This year, inspired by Linda Cracknell’s Creative Writing workshop back in August, I’ve decided to try to imagine the same story from the point of view of the books. I don’t think I’ll be giving up […]
Building the Books and Borrowing Digital Resource
Over the past few months, we have been busy thinking about how we can make all the data we have been accumulating available to other people. In other words, we’ve been thinking through the eventual front-end of our database, and working out with our wonderful developer Brian Aitken what will work best in terms of […]
Metaphors of Reading, 1760-1830
For the past few weeks, Cleo and I have been working together on an article that we hope to submit for publication fairly soon. We thought we would share some initial thoughts about it on this blog. The topic of the article is metaphors that we have spotted in a variety of different works from […]
Bruce, the Bible, and a Borrowing: James Bruce of Kinnaird and the Leighton Library, Dunblane
Working with historical borrowing records provides you with a host of names. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the challenges of researching the biographical details of our library borrowers. In the modern age of scholarly research, the first step in such an endeavour is often a trusty web search in the hope of […]
Another Forgotten Bestseller: Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830)
To celebrate Book Week Scotland this week, we are presenting another forgotten bestseller. “It was a dark and stormy night”. Inspired by Linda Cracknell’s Creative Writing workshop in August, I decided to read the book with that famous first line. The book is, of course, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Paul Clifford, first published in 1830, and […]