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 […]
Category: 16th-century items
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 […]
Astronomicum Caesareum
Peter Apian’s Astronomicum Caesareum (Ingolstadt, 1540) is one of the finest printed books in the National Library of Scotland, hand coloured throughout and featuring ingenious and beautiful volvelles. Apian, humanist mathematician and astronomer and born Bienewitz in Leisnig, Saxony (Biene is German for bee, hence the Latinizing of his name to Apian), was the son […]
January Map of the Month: Sea creatures
Aurora Borealis – By Marco Ottobelli – Own work, [CC BY-SA 4.0] What does “Iceland” mean to you? To me the name conjures up the distinctive Icelandic style of knitting very cosy jumpers, Magnus and Sally Magnusson, long dark nights with the Northern Lights putting on a show, and nervously watching the latest up-dates on […]
Map of the Month – Marauder’s Map
I solemnly swear that I am up to no good! J.K. Rowling’s magnificent imagination conjured up the Marauder’s Map of Hogwarts Castle. This magical map is usually disguised as a blank piece of parchment, activated by the spell above. Once unlocked, the map reveals a detailed plan of Hogwarts, covered in named, moving dots which […]