“A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on the imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid’s weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind”. December 3, 2019 marks the 125th anniversary of the death of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). As a memorial, the […]
Author: James Mitchell
Cross Trust Special Collections Interns 2019
Our names are Jennifer Stewart and Honor Wilson and we have just completed a four-week Special Collections Internship at the National Library of Scotland. We both had backgrounds working within the archival and library sector prior to commencing our internships: Honor had volunteered at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections and is about […]
Cross Trust Special Collections Interns 2018
Our names are James Fox and Amanda Bowie and we have just completed a four week Special Collections Internship with the National Library of Scotland. Both of us have a background in history: James is about to enter the final year of an MA in History at the University of St Andrews and Amanda has […]
Forty Years Gone: New Wave and Disco in 1978
The year 1978 saw a changing of the guard in popular music. The decade-long dominance of heavy blues-based rock was coming to an end and in its place two new genres, new wave and disco, would rise to attain massive worldwide popularity while at the same time becoming templates for popular music up to the […]
Talwin Morris: Book Design and the Glasgow School at the Turn of the 20th century
My name is Kathryn Hillman. I’ve just completed a postgraduate internship within Rare Books Collections as part of my MSc in Art in the Global Middle Ages at the University of Edinburgh. I spent most of my time here at the National Library working on the Provenance Project, researching and identifying the previous ownership history of rare books […]
Oliver & Boyd
Recent visitors to the National Library of Scotland may have noticed two stern visages gazing down on them as they ascend the front stair.
16th Century Venetian Chapbooks
I’m presently cataloguing the important collection of chapbooks held in the Lauriston Castle Collection. Chapbooks are small paper-covered booklets, usually printed on a single sheet, folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages, and often illustrated with crude woodcuts. They were in circulation primarily from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and sold by […]
Cross Trust Special Collections Interns
Our names are Amy Kerr and Jennifer Roach and we have just completed our four week special collections internship in Archives, Records Management and Rare Books Librarianship. We are very grateful to have been given this opportunity, which was was funded by the Cross Trust. We both came from different postgraduate courses: Amy is completing […]
SGT. PEPPER: IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY
The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in the UK on May 26, 1967. It remains the third best selling album in the UK: only Queen’s Greatest Hits (1981) and Abba’s Gold: Greatest Hits (1992) have outsold it. To mark this anniversary, the National Library of Scotland has mounted a free display of […]
Art Collections: Eduardo Paolozzi and Isaac Newton
One would not automatically associate the National Library of Scotland with art collections. In fact, the Library has acquired a substantial number of paintings, sculptures, busts and art prints through the centuries and continues to add to these collections. In addition to being a Curator of Rare Books, one of my other hats is Art […]