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 […]
Tag: exhibition
You are Here A journey through maps.
Accurate, beautiful, clever, dangerous, exciting. Maps can be all of these things. They show us new places, help us re-imagine familiar haunts and even enable us to travel through time. A map is both a useful tool and a magic carpet to far-away places. In the cold winter months we can travel in our minds […]
Scots poet on display – T.S. Law
Thomas Sturdy Law (1916-1997), a committed and powerful poet in the Scots language, was born in Lanarkshire one hundred years ago on Hallowe’en. Our current display in the main hall of our George IV Bridge building in Edinburgh notes the centenary of his birth, drawing on our extensive manuscript and published collections.
Map of the Month: Edinburgh in 1582
The first map of the month for You are Here the National Library of Scotland’s exhibition of maps is Edenburgum, Scotiae Metropolis, which will be on display until the end of August. This attractive birds-eye view of Edinburgh was engraved around 1582 by Franz Hogenberg, for inclusion in the Civitates Orbis Terrarum edited by Georg […]
Playing Shakespeare – curtain coming down very soon
Our Treasures exhibition – Playing Shakespeare: 400 years of great acting– part of this year’s world-wide commemoration of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, is coming to the end of its run, with only a few days left. Monday 13 June is your last chance to see four centuries of Shakespeare on stage.
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 […]
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 […]
Going to the Pictures – Scolympians!
With the Olympics now upon us, it is good to report that our current exhibition Going to the Pictures: Scotland at the Cinema has not forgotten to include Scolympians – even if one of them is a work of fiction!
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 […]
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 […]