Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Tag: Royal High School

Forgotten Best-Sellers: The World Displayed; or, a Curious Collection of Voyages and Travels

From the moment I began to seriously crunch the numbers on the borrowers’ records of the Royal High School, the unrivalled popularity of two titles came to the fore: Charles Rollin’s Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians, and Greeks and The World Displayed; or, a Curious Collection of Voyages […]

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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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Forgotten Best-Sellers: Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811)

In her blog last week, Katie Halsey introduced the first of a new series within the Books and Borrowing blog: the ‘Forgotten Best-Sellers’. These best-sellers must ‘either top the charts in a single library, or…appear frequently across a large number of different libraries’; they are works that ‘were clearly popular and important in their own […]

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Individual Readers at the Royal High School

One of my favourite things about working with library borrowers’ records is getting to know the individual quirks and tastes of specific borrowers. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the borrowing habits of the boys at the Royal High School began to diversify. Prior to this, a large majority visited the library to borrow […]

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The Royal High School of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh

I’ve been so delighted to get started with the Books and Borrowing team and have really enjoyed getting stuck in and learning all about the project’s Content Management System (CMS) and what’s been achieved so far. ‘Books and Borrowing’ is a project close to my heart as my PhD focused on the pupil borrowing records […]

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