Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

Tag: women borrowers

7 Pieces of Music to be Arranged: Women Borrowers and the First Female Cataloguer of the St Andrews Copyright Music Collection

Guest post by Dr Karen E McAulay, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland In 1801, the University of St Andrews started binding a backlog of legally deposited sheet music.  Music was roughly sorted into volumes for voice, piano or instrumental ensemble; binding became a routine practice over the subsequent three and a half decades. The music was […]

Read more

Women Borrowers at Westerkirk Library

To mark Women’s History Month, we’re running a series of blogs to highlight the women who wrote and borrowed the books found in our libraries. Today, I’m returning to Westerkirk Library in Dumfriesshire, where a small but active cohort of women members made over 250 borrowings between 1813 and 1818. Eight of the 120 borrowers […]

Read more

Women Borrowers

Today is International Women’s Day, and so I have been reflecting on the women in our records. I thought I would begin with a famous passage from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which the speaker is barred from entering a library in one of the ‘Oxbridge’ colleges: [H]ere I was actually at […]

Read more