The Beano is Britain’s longest running comic and celebrated its 80th birthday on 30th July 2018. So a slightly belated happy birthday. We did though throw a party for the Beano at our Kelvin Hall premises in Glasgow on Saturday the 28th of July. We showed for one day only our copy of Beano issue […]
Category: Exhibitions and events
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 […]
The Eternal Courier trip
I am the Library’s Exhibitions Conservator and some people might say I have the best job in the Library, travelling the globe and taking our collections with me, to let the rest of the world see what we have here in the National Library of Scotland. A recent trip couriering items to Rome – […]
WWII AIR RAID PRECAUTIONS
The next Scottish Local History Forum Annual Lecture will be held in the Library on 13 February, when Professor Niall Logan will be talking about Duping the Luftwaffe. There is an accompanying display in the Library which showcases items relating to this, as well as to civil defence and air raid precautions. With another war […]
Iconic Jet Aircraft display
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first commercial flight by Concorde from Heathrow to New York, I created a display celebrating iconic jet aircraft on the mezzanine level of the General Reading Room. This focuses on Concorde, the Vulcan, Red Arrows, Tornado, Harrier and Typhoon jets. The first 3 being the most iconic. The […]
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 […]
The music behind our Staffa display (17-27 August 2017)
In the 19th century many composers, including Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847), were inspired by Scottish literature to write music based on Scottish themes. The main influences were Ossian, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. Most major composers did not visit Scotland in person and so the inspiration remained cultural. However, Mendelssohn was one of the few […]
Stephen King turning seventy
Master of horror Stephen King, who has written over fifty novels and roughly two hundred short stories, turns seventy next month. The influence of his work is as strong as ever, with film adaptations of “The Dark Tower” and “It” due for cinema release in the coming weeks and a series based on one of […]
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 […]
SAFHS Conference and Family History Fair 2017
The Scottish Association of Family History Societies (SAFHS) Annual Conference and Family History Fair is on Saturday 22 April 2017 at The Bay Hotel, Pettycur, Burntisland Road, Kinghorn, KY3 9YE. The theme of this years event is ‘Building Bridges: Making Connections’. Along with many other stall holders, the National Library of Scotland will be in […]