Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Latest Posts

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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J. Cuthbert Hadden: ‘Master of the Song’

Originally posted at the Library of Innerpeffray blog and re-posted here with permission. In short, in regard to music, our great writers have been just like other people—some have been passionately fond of music, some have liked it in a mild kind of way, and some have been absolutely indifferent to it.[1] James Cuthbert Hadden […]

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International Women’s Day 2022

Today, 8 March, 2022 is International Women’s Day, and I’m therefore going to take the opportunity to reflect a little, both on the women writers and readers we find in our borrowing records, as I did last year and also on those we don’t see – the wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, friends, and […]

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Il étoit une fois…: The Advocates Library and the ‘Le Cabinet des Fées’

When I began transcribing the borrowing registers of the Advocates Library, I expected to find that law reports, Session Papers, periodicals, and books of law were popular with the erudite lawyers of the Faculty of Advocates. I took stock upon the completion of the transcriptions for two registers covering the period from 1 April 1788 […]

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