![Handel's Overtures 11th Collection Set for the Harpsichord or Organ ... Time and Truth, Jephtha, Theodora, Deborah, to which is added the Coronation Anthem. London: I. Walsh, [1758]. NLS reference: BH.266](https://blog.nls.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Almut4-750x410.jpg)
It is coronation time again after seventy years! It will be a grand ceremony with old and new elements of the service and its music. Let us introduce you to a coronation anthem which was composed by German-British composer, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) for the coronation of George II in 1727: Zadok the Priest. It […]
David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes: Collector and Engraver
Hello, my name is Caroline Thirlwell and I am a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh studying Global Premodern Art: History Heritage and Curation. For the past three months I have been working as an intern at the National Library of Scotland in the Rare Books Division under the supervision of curator James Mitchell. […]
Two lurid 1940’s paperbacks published in Glasgow
The publisher most associated with paperbacks in the UK is Penguin Books who, changed British reading habits forever when they published their first ten titles in 1935. The ten included literary fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Eric Linklater, crime stories by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers and the first Penguin book “Ariel” by André […]
Tom Hanlin: Scottish miner and bestselling novelist whose work was praised by John Steinbeck
Scottish literature has a strong tradition of novels of working-class life by working-class authors. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s ‘A Scots Quair’ (1932-4), William McIlvanney’s ‘Docherty’ (1975), James Kelman’s ‘The Bus Conductor Hines’ (1984) and Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1993) are among the classic works of Scottish proletarian literature. The only two Scottish novels that have won the […]
The first issues of ‘The Scotsman’ from 1817 have been added to our Treasures exhibition
The permanent and free ‘Treasures of the National Library’ exhibition at our main building in Edinburgh gives visitors the chance to see some of the most important items in our collections. We have recently refreshed the contents of the exhibition. From March 2023 you can see the first edition of Robert Burns’s ‘Poems’, printed at […]
Initial success : J. R. Hartley and other authors who use initials
In 1983 the best-known author in Britain was not a bestseller like Jeffrey Archer, Roald Dahl, or Fay Weldon but J.R. Hartley the author of “Fly fishing”. The book was featured in an advert promoting the Yellow Pages telephone directory. “Fly fishing” was the object of a quest round second-hand bookshops by an elderly gentleman. […]
Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” was originally published under a pen name
It is just over sixty years since the death of Sylvia Plath on February 11, 1963 at the age of thirty. Less than a month earlier she had published the novel ‘The Bell Jar’ under the pen name Victoria Lucas. This rare edition, the initial print run was only 2000 copies, is currently being exhibited […]
‘Razor cuts’ from the Aberdeen New Shaver
We have recently published images of some early Scottish newspapers on our Digital Gallery, ‘Scotland’s News’, including the short-lived scandal sheet the Aberdeen new shaver
“I am always uncertain whether or not I see a real or an assumed signature”: David Lyndsay, Mary Diana Dods and Walter Sholto Douglas
David Lyndsay was the pseudonym of the author born Mary Diana Dods, and who from 1827 lived as Walter Sholto Douglas. Details about their life are patchy. It was the researcher Betty T. Bennett, editor of Mary Shelley’s letters who first made the connection between Dods, Lyndsay and Douglas in the 1980s. Bennett’s research at […]
Pen Names: Doris Lessing to Jane Somers
When you ask yourself why a writer might choose to use a pen name, what springs to mind? Perhaps you think of the famous female writers of the nineteenth century, like the Brontë sisters, for whom publishing under their real names would have risked not being published at all. Or you think of it as […]