Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Latest Posts

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Libraries, Lives and Legacies: Further Details on our Call for Papers for April 2023

This week, we’d like to highlight the Call for Papers we posted a couple of weeks back (posted again in full below) and provide a bit of extra detail about our Research Festival. In April 2023, Books and Borrowing and our friends on the C18th Libraries Online project expect to be able to launch initial […]

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Supernatural Visions: A Halloween Post

Second Sight Studying the Supernatural An entry showing that George Graham Bell borrowed ‘Aubreys Miscellanies’ from the Advocates Library on 1 January 1823 seems innocuous enough. But dare to open the library catalogue the full title reveals a world of the supernatural: Miscellanies, viz. I. Day-fatality. II. Local-fatality. III. Ostenta. IV. Omens. V. Dreams. VI. […]

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Research Festival Call for Papers: Libraries, Lives and Legacies, April 2023

Libraries, Lives and Legacies Organised by the AHRC-funded ‘Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830′ and ‘Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic’ projects. www.borrowing.stir.ac.uk http://c18librariesonline.org/  Split-Venue Research Festival 13-14 April 2023 – University of Liverpool and online 17-18 April 2023 – University of Stirling We are glad to announce a series of events on […]

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Books and Borrowing Creative Writing Competition Announcement

Calling all creative writers! The Books and Borrowing project are delighted to announce the launch of the 2022 Books and Borrowing Creative Writing Competition. Entries may be in any genre (prose, verse, drama) but must not exceed 2000 words of prose, or 40 lines of poetry. They must be on the theme of books and […]

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Books and Borrowing Creative Writing Competition: Materials

The materials here are provided in support of the Books and Borrowing Creative Writing Competition. Innerpeffray Library Transcription 1859 Nov 19 Chambers Journal John Edwards P[olice] Constable Muthill Returned 10 Jan 60 “ Men of the Line Hugh Campbell Labourer Gilmore Returned 21 Dec “ Brougham’s Sketches Vol 6 [?]McClean Niven Miller Mill of Earn […]

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A New Chapter

In October I started work on a new project, bringing my two years as a research fellow with Books and Borrowing to an end. It’s been an exceptionally rewarding period for me intellectually, and the project and team have often felt like an island of stability in uncertain times. I’m determined to stay in touch […]

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