Legal deposit legislation means that most UK and Irish publications are in our collections. As a consequence we have items you might not expect to find in a reference library such as car and other repair manuals and Mills and Boon romances. If you need information on how to build a shed, knit a jumper, […]
Category: 20th-century items
You can now explore “The Listener” magazine for free
You might have thought about getting a reader’s ticket for the National Library of Scotland but decided against it as it is not convenient for you to visit our Edinburgh reading rooms. Did you know that free membership of the Library lets you consult our physical collections but also gives you remote access to digital […]
Myth, romance, adventure: An Outlander inspired trip through the Scottish film archive
This blog, inspired by the television series Outlander, will take you on a time travelling tour of Scotland on film! The National Library of Scotland has a world-class collection of moving images available to all. Whether a scholar or fan, explore the romance and reality of Scottish history recorded in both documentary and imaginative works. […]
Two lurid 1940’s paperbacks published in Glasgow
The publisher most associated with paperbacks in the UK is Penguin Books who, changed British reading habits forever when they published their first ten titles in 1935. The ten included literary fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Eric Linklater, crime stories by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers and the first Penguin book “Ariel” by André […]
Tom Hanlin: Scottish miner and bestselling novelist whose work was praised by John Steinbeck
Scottish literature has a strong tradition of novels of working-class life by working-class authors. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s ‘A Scots Quair’ (1932-4), William McIlvanney’s ‘Docherty’ (1975), James Kelman’s ‘The Bus Conductor Hines’ (1984) and Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1993) are among the classic works of Scottish proletarian literature. The only two Scottish novels that have won the […]
Initial success : J. R. Hartley and other authors who use initials
In 1983 the best-known author in Britain was not a bestseller like Jeffrey Archer, Roald Dahl, or Fay Weldon but J.R. Hartley the author of “Fly fishing”. The book was featured in an advert promoting the Yellow Pages telephone directory. “Fly fishing” was the object of a quest round second-hand bookshops by an elderly gentleman. […]
Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” was originally published under a pen name
It is just over sixty years since the death of Sylvia Plath on February 11, 1963 at the age of thirty. Less than a month earlier she had published the novel ‘The Bell Jar’ under the pen name Victoria Lucas. This rare edition, the initial print run was only 2000 copies, is currently being exhibited […]
Pen Names: Doris Lessing to Jane Somers
When you ask yourself why a writer might choose to use a pen name, what springs to mind? Perhaps you think of the famous female writers of the nineteenth century, like the Brontë sisters, for whom publishing under their real names would have risked not being published at all. Or you think of it as […]
“Mark” a short story by Saki
Our blog generally features short pieces on the Library’s collections and associated activities but as it is the holiday season we thought we would post a very short story. The story and its author are featured in our current exhibition “Pen names” which explores authors who publish books under assumed names. The author of the […]
The many names of Laurence James
The National Library of Scotland is a Legal Deposit library, which means we build our collections by requesting a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland. Thanks to Legal Deposit the Library is home to probably the largest collection of popular fiction in Scotland. If you are interested in crime, romance, westerns, […]