We have a new printed special and named collection available to consult in our Special Collections Reading Room: the Peter Sharratt Collection. This is a selection of 153 volumes from the library of the late Dr. Peter Sharratt (d. 2014), a former lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, who specialised in the French Renaissance and its literature. He was co-author of a key work on Franco-Scottish Latin drama and Scotland’s leading humanist poet and scholar of the 16th century, George Buchanan.
Dr Sharratt was a regular user of the Library’s reading rooms in our George IV Bridge building and a keen collector of early Continental books; he also built up a substantial collection of African tribal art. His New Town flat was full of books purchased at auction and from Edinburgh booksellers over the last 30-40 years. The books we selected are mainly 16th- and 17th-century Continental books, which were not already in our collections or held elsewhere in Scotland, so they are a very welcome addition. Dr Sharratt also bequeathed some manuscripts to the Library, mainly 19th-century diaries and travel accounts compiled by Scottish families. Some of the printed books have bookplates or marks of ownership which show that they were owned by early Scottish book collectors. The oldest item in the collection is a book of Latin poetry by the Italian scholar Giovanni Augurelli: the Iambicus liber Primus, which was published by the famous Aldine Press of Venice in 1505. The books are mainly on theology, but there are also texts of Classical authors, legal works and some histories. You can order books to consult from the Peter Sharratt collection via our Main Catalogue http://main-cat.nls.uk/vwebv/searchBasic?sk=nls_en (do a shelfmark search on ‘Sharratt.’) and you can find out more about our special and named printed collections in our directory:
http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/snpc/index.cfm