Out in Scotland! LGBT display

(Sandstone Press) February is  LGBT History Month and we are celebrating the LGBT Scottish writing perspective with a small display just outside the Reading Rooms in our George IV Bridge building in Edinburgh. LGBT writing is especially vibrant in Scotland at the moment with many top sellers and prize winners. Recent National Library guest Val […]

Read More

Stevenson on screen

This week we are celebrating Robert Louis Stevenson’s contribution to cinema with a display highlighting film versions of his most famous novels. Although he died in 1894, a couple of years before the birth of cinema, RLS made an impact on films all the same. He is one of the most adapted writers for the […]

Read More

David Hockney: a bigger picture

(Photo credit: Royal Academy of Arts. Image above shows a red-coloured path with grass, flowers and a line of brightly coloured trees on either side of it with the text David Hockney A bigger picture in the centre of the image) The Royal Academy of Arts presents the first major exhibition of new landscape works […]

Read More

On World Book Day: in praise of books

I thought it would be appropriate to mark World Book Day with some quotations from our exhibition Beyond Macbeth in praise of books. William Drummond is one of my favourite collectors – his motivation in building his collection seems to have been his love of reading all kinds of literature. He wrote two essays about libraries. The first […]

Read More