A potted history of pen names

A pen name is a literary alias: a variation of a writer’s birth or married name or a completely invented pseudonym. The Library’s exhibition ‘Pen Names’ takes a thematic approach to the subject, looking at how factors such as privacy, gender, reputation, authenticity, and genre have influenced writers’ decision to use a pen name from […]

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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 […]

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Sun-pictures and beyond

Scotland and the photographically illustrated book 1845-1900 In October 1844 Henry Talbot, the inventor of the calotype negative (Talbotype) process of photography travelled to Scotland along with Nicolaas Henneman, his former valet who was now running his own Talbotype establishment in Reading. Talbot, with the aid of Henneman, was planning to take photographs to illustrate […]

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Man standing on biplane in flight

Sausages, steam trains and biplanes : Showcasing 100 years of Scotland on film

Most people when they think of films probably think of the latest blockbusters showing at the cinema; fantastic stories far removed from everyday life, and rarely showing anything of Scotland.  What many people don’t realise is that for four decades the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive has been collecting and preserving all kinds […]

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Our world-class collections

We’d like to welcome old and new readers to our refreshed National Library of Scotland blog. We’ll be posting a wide variety of regular updates about our outstanding collections. We hold over 24 million items and have much more than books. We also offer maps, films, photographs, manuscripts and archives, music scores, newspapers and much […]

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