Latest Posts
Abbotsford; or, The Day Out
The ‘Books and Borrowing’ team recently had the pleasure of a long-awaited trip to Abbotsford, the former home of Walter Scott on the river Tweed in the Scottish Borders. As I have discussed previously here and here on this blog, Scott has a peculiar importance for the study of library borrowing records between 1750 and […]
Guest Post – An Overview of Glasgow in the Eighteenth Century
by Dr Craig Lamont, University of Glasgow In April, the Books and Borrowing project examined a swathe of material relating to eighteenth-century Glasgow, with papers on registers, marginalia, the missing lectures of Adam Smith, and the cultural context of William Hunter’s library. To set the scene, I provided an overview of Glasgow in the period, […]
Guest Post – Event Horizons: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth Century Glasgow
by Christina Devlin, Professor of English and Reading, Montgomery College, Maryland In April, I was a guest at Books and Borrowing’s workshop at Archives and Special Collections at the University of Glasgow. The twelfth-floor view of the Campsie Hills, new to me as a recent transplant to Glasgow, epitomized how the project expands studies of […]
Books and Borrowing: Edinburgh’s 19th Century Readers – Online Event with NLS
In conjunction with our partners at the National Library of Scotland, we’re pleased to announce the upcoming online event, ‘Books and Borrowing: Edinburgh’s 19th Century Readers’, which will take place from 5.00-6.00pm on Thursday 23 June, 2022. This event is free, and we invite you to book your place through Eventbrite. Join the Books and […]
Guest Post – Institutional Borrowing: Inventories, Registers, Receipt Books
By Dr Dahlia Porter, University of Glasgow [This post is based on a talk I gave at the Books and Borrowing event on 7 April 2022, which was unfortunately interrupted by a power outage!] In this post, I am going to compare book borrowing registers like those being digitized by the Books and Borrowing project […]
Guest Post – University of Glasgow Library borrowing registers, beyond the borrowing: what additional insights can they provide?
by Robert MacLean, Assistant Librarian in Archives and Special Collections, University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections (ASC) at the University of Glasgow holds the institution’s historical library records, including old catalogues, library committee minutes, acquisition ledgers and the registers recording when books were borrowed and by whom. Until recently these have been rather overlooked […]
Mapping Borrowers from Robert Chambers’ Edinburgh Circulating Library
Earlier in the year, I reported that the Books and Borrowing Project had begun the work of entering the records of Robert Chambers’ Edinburgh Circulating Library into our database. Here, I’d like to share some initial progress towards an additional project, which will use data from the Chambers records to create an online map of […]
Event Report: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow
We had the pleasure of running an event in Glasgow University Library Special Collections last week. This was an opportunity for us to share some of the research we have done specifically on the university’s own records, while bringing together colleagues with cognate interests to think more expansively about the Glasgow context and about the […]
Event Preview: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow
On Thursday 7th April, we are running the next of our project events: ‘Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow’ will be a convivial in-person/online workshop exploring eighteenth-century literary culture using the borrowing records of Glasgow University Library. It is being co-produced with our partners at GUL Special Collections. The event will be an opportunity to […]
Poetry: A Reflection
21 March 2022 was World Poetry Day. The Books and Borrowing team were either observing the strike action called by the University and College Union (UCU), or respecting the digital picket line, so we did not post a blog that day (for those interested in this dispute, please see here). However, I didn’t want to […]