Collated by Emma Boyd East Ayrshire is a largely rural council area in the south-west of the country with a population of over 122,000 at the last census. The area was formed in 1996, from the former Kilmarnock and Loudoun, and Cumnock and Doon Valley districts; and the majority of people live in or around […]
Category: 16th-century items
Zoom into Stirling
Collated by Jamie McIntosh. The Stirling authority area is at the heart of Scotland and spans the traditional boundary between the lowlands and highlands. To the west of the region sit the Campsie Fells and the Fintry Hills, which eventually give way to Loch Lomond. The boundary of the authority runs up the east side of the loch, taking in the Trossachs and Ben Lomond. The northern area of the authority is generally […]
Discovering 16th Century Atlases
Blog written by Rosie Seidel, MSc in Book History and Material Culture student at the University of Edinburgh. In an effort to increase the discoverability of and access to maps in the collections, I have been working to index and identify editions of 15th century Ptolemaic and Ortelian atlases.
Scotland: Defending the Nation – Mapping the Military Landscape
Some of the most detailed and alarming military maps of Scotland were made by external aggressors, planning attack or invasion. Here we look at maps made by four of these countries: French charts, 1800s In the early 18th century, when Napoleonic France made preparations for an invasion of Great Britain, the best available charts of […]
Rare Book Electronic Resources
When you register with the National Library of Scotland you have free access to an extensive range of electronic resources. If your main address is in Scotland you can also use many of these resources from any computer outwith the National Library simply by logging into your Library account. Among these resources are two that […]
Scottish Book Trade Index Revamped!
The Scottish Book Trade Index is now fully searchable! The new version has all the information from the old one, but you can now combine searches rather than looking for one word such as a name or trade. You can, for instance, find out how many booksellers there were in Brechin in the 18th century […]
A generous bequest to the Library
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 […]
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 […]
500 years of the Protestant Reformation
On 31 October 1517 the German monk Martin Luther posted 95 theses for academic disputation on the door of a church in Wittenberg. This event now symbolises the starting point of the Protestant Reformation, and this year sees its 500th anniversary. We have put on an exhibition of original Lutheran tracts which tell the story […]
Bound for King James VI
The Library has recently acquired a book bound in vellum for King James VI, probably in the 1580s. This is one of a small group of books that are known to exist in bindings that were produced for James before the union of the crowns in 1603 and is a significant purchase. Of the nine […]