Latest Posts
Books, Books, More Books (and some Borrowers)! Two Library Excursions at the Books and Borrowing Conference
Today is the last day to register for the Books and Borrowing conference in April – don’t miss out, and make sure to sign up now at Reading and Book Circulation, 1650-1850 | University of Stirling Online Shop. We are excited to announce that there will be two excursions during the Books and Borrowing conference, […]
Announcement: Books and Borrowing Creative Writing Competition: Second Prize!
We are delighted to congratulate Jenny Mitchell, whose short story ‘Byron Jumps Slave Trader in Stromness’ was awarded the second prize in our Books and Borrowing Creative Writing competition. Jenny was inspired by the records of the Orkney Library, held in the Orkney Library & Archive in Kirkwall. Jenny is in her late sixties. At […]
Announcement: Books and Borrowing Creative Writing Competition Winner!
We are delighted to announce that the Winner of our Creative Writing competition is Helen Hutchinson, whose short story ‘Taking Flight – A Victorian Tale’ was inspired by the Borrowers’ Register from Innerpeffray Library pictured above. Our judge, Daisy Hay, on awarding Helen the prize, commented: This is a beautifully evoked and moving story that […]
Our Conference Programme: 17-18 April 2023, University of Stirling
We are very excited this week to release the programme for the forthcoming Books and Borrowing conference, held as part of the Libraries, Lives and Legacies Research Festival, at the University of Stirling on 17th and 18th April of this year. Register here Reading and Book Circulation, 1650-1850 | University of Stirling Online Shop If […]
News and Updates
The Books and Borrowing team have been very busy this week! In between our usual tasks of data entry, data normalisation, research, teaching and administration, we have been doing the preliminary judging round for our Creative Writing conference. The next stage in the competition is for our celebrity judge, Daisy Hay, to make her decision, […]
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 […]