Every four years ice skating captures the attention of the world when the Winter Olympics take place. This week the world has watched Aliona Savchenko with partner Bruno Massot collapse on the ice with joy and exhaustion after winning Olympic gold at her fifth attempt. In 1984 a British television audience of more than 24 […]
Author: Ian Scott
Elizabeth Craig 1883-1980: Scotland’s first celebrity chef?
“5 Ingredients” by Jamie Oliver was the best-selling book in Britain last year selling over 700,000 copies and confirming the popularity of the celebrity chef. We perhaps think of celebrity chefs as a fairly recent phenomenon dating back to the 1950s with Fanny Craddock and later Delia Smith, Ken Hom and Keith Floyd leading the […]
Gordon Williams 1934-2017. Novelist from Paisley who almost won the Booker Prize
George Gissing’s 1891 novel “New Grub Street” about literary and journalistic London has as its main characters two aspiring writers. Jasper Milvain who puts commercial success ahead of art and secures the editorship of an important periodical and Edwin Reardon who although a talented novelist can’t support his family, his wife leaves him and he […]
The pulp novels of Nat Karta
One of the main aims of the National Library of Scotland is to collect a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom and in particular every book published in Scotland. Inevitably we miss a few items. Recently we were delighted to plug a small hole in our collections dating from the late 1940s […]
“Knots and Crosses” the first Rebus novel is 30 years old
It is thirty years since the first Rebus novel “Knots & crosses” was published and to mark the occasion REBUSFEST a weekend of literature, art, film and music celebrating the detective is being held in Edinburgh from 30th June to 2nd July. You can tour Rebus’s Edinburgh, sample whisky at the Caledonian Hotel or attend […]
Discover the work of Scottish poet Marion Angus
Marion Angus is a fine lyrical poet, most of whose work was written in the Scots language. Kathleen Jamie has said of Marion Angus “She has an authentic voice straight out of the ballad tradition, an eerie shimmer to her best poems”. Since her death her poems have gone in and out of print while […]
Magazines at the National Library of Scotland
As you would expect the National Library of Scotland has academic journals on all disciplines and also Scottish magazines and serial publications ranging from influential 19th century literary journals such as “Blackwood’s Edinburgh magazine” to modern titles such as D C Thomson’s recently launched “Danger mouse” comic and the new Scottish football journal “Nutmeg”. What […]
Five Scottish women writers whose works are being digitised for 2017
Once you get past the early hours of the morning traditionally very little happens in Scotland on New Year’s Day. Appropriately on January 1st 2017 something is happening that is very quiet, automatic but in terms of Scottish literature quite exciting. The works of five varied but important Scottish female authors will no longer be […]
Yes we have colouring books in the library but sorry you can’t colour them in
As well as being a repository of knowledge the National Library of Scotland is an archive of publishing trends and fashions. You might remember the Magic Eye books of the mid 1990s? If you squinted at an image in these books in the right way a 3D landscape would open up before your eyes as […]
Arthur Conan Doyle and the Berlin Olympics of 1916 that never took place
A century ago in 1916 the sixth Olympics of the modern era were scheduled to take place in Berlin but due to war they did not go ahead. Our collections include publications about the planning and preparations for these Olympics that never were. “The evolution of the Olympic Games 1829 B.C.-1914 A.D.” by F. A. […]