When Hilary Mantel returned to Britain in 1982 after living in Botswana for five years she noticed unfamiliar green book spines everywhere. She discovered that these were Virago Modern Classics and recognised them as a change for the better in the world of publishing. Virago was founded in 1975 by Carmen Callil, Marsha Rowe and Rosie […]
Tag: book history
Happy Birthday Beano!
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 […]
Elizabeth Craig 1883-1980: Scotland’s first celebrity chef?
“5 Ingredients” by Jamie Oliver was the best-selling book in Britain last year selling over 700,000 copies and confirming the popularity of the celebrity chef. We perhaps think of celebrity chefs as a fairly recent phenomenon dating back to the 1950s with Fanny Craddock and later Delia Smith, Ken Hom and Keith Floyd leading the […]
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 […]
Gordon Williams 1934-2017. Novelist from Paisley who almost won the Booker Prize
George Gissing’s 1891 novel “New Grub Street” about literary and journalistic London has as its main characters two aspiring writers. Jasper Milvain who puts commercial success ahead of art and secures the editorship of an important periodical and Edwin Reardon who although a talented novelist can’t support his family, his wife leaves him and he […]
The pulp novels of Nat Karta
One of the main aims of the National Library of Scotland is to collect a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom and in particular every book published in Scotland. Inevitably we miss a few items. Recently we were delighted to plug a small hole in our collections dating from the late 1940s […]
Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh
My name is Sarah Hutcheson. I’m currently completing an internship within Rare Books Collections as part of my MSc in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. I have 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 […]
Five Scottish women writers whose works are being digitised for 2017
Once you get past the early hours of the morning traditionally very little happens in Scotland on New Year’s Day. Appropriately on January 1st 2017 something is happening that is very quiet, automatic but in terms of Scottish literature quite exciting. The works of five varied but important Scottish female authors will no longer be […]
Yes we have colouring books in the library but sorry you can’t colour them in
As well as being a repository of knowledge the National Library of Scotland is an archive of publishing trends and fashions. You might remember the Magic Eye books of the mid 1990s? If you squinted at an image in these books in the right way a 3D landscape would open up before your eyes as […]
Bobby Moore’s 1966 autobiography was written by a Scotsman
As it is the 50th anniversary of England winning the World Cup in 1966 we thought we would highlight a Scottish literary connection to England’s triumph. England Captain Bobby Moore’s autobiography “My soccer story” was ghost written by a Scotsman who would go onto to become a Booker Prize shortlisted author and be involved in […]