Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Tag: Advocates Library

The Maga, Murder, and Immanuel Kant: Thomas De Quincey and the Advocates Library

Gloucester Place is an attractive Georgian terrace at the northern edge of the New Town just before the streets drop down to Stockbridge. It’s the sort of street that makes me wish for a large lottery win. At No. 6 is a chic boutique hotel with a restaurant and bar called ‘Blackwoods’. A verdigris plaque […]

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Hallowe’en Reading

Happy Spooky Season to all our loyal readers! Having just come back from the USA, where Hallowe’en is everywhere throughout October, I thought I would see what kinds of spooky reading events I could find in our dataset. A quick keyword search in our new digital resource (soon to be fully open to the public!) […]

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Visiting the Advocates Library in the 18th Century

We are fortunate that some of our Books and Borrowing libraries survive in forms our eighteenth and nineteenth century borrowers would recognise. The books of Innerpeffray Library and the Leighton Library still live in their original homes of 1762 and 1687 respectively. For other libraries, such as the university libraries in our study, the books […]

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Event Report: Books and Borrowing: Edinburgh’s 19th Century Readers

On Thursday 23rd June, members of the Books and Borrowing team were joined by an online audience for an event highlighting our work on Edinburgh’s historic libraries. This session was hosted by the National Library of Scotland as part of their regular webinar series, and we’re grateful to the library as a whole, and particularly […]

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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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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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A First Look at the Advocates Library

We have now taken delivery of a first set of images from the borrowers’ receipt books of the Advocates Library with the permission of our partners the Faculty of Advocates and via the digitisation skills of our partners the National Library of Scotland. Our Digital Humanities Research Officer Brian Aitken has loaded these to our […]

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A Painted Literary Parthenon for the Athens of the North

Any keeper of books will know that space is always at a premium and by the late 1790s, two Edinburgh institutional libraries found that they needed more shelves to house their collections. The Faculty of Advocates and the Writers to the Signet came together to create a library complex next to Parliament House. The Signet […]

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