National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day! I’d like to celebrate this event by showcasing how a poem can act as a link between nations, in this case between Scotland and Germany. In 1802, Walter Scott published his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Bk.5/1.3-4), a collection of “historical and romantic ballads, collected in the southern counties of Scotland”, as the subtitle said. […]

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Shakespeare lives on…

Our Shakespeare exhibition has finished, but it still lives on in our Digital Gallery in the form of two different features. Shakespeare Collected allows you to explore the collectors and collections we celebrated in our exhibition, through text, films, and images. You can also follow in the footsteps of the collector James Halliwell-Phillipps and build […]

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Shakespeare Exhibition: Beyond Macbeth

  Our new exhibition Beyond Macbeth: Shakespeare in Scottish Collections is now open! This exhibition is a collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, showcasing the two libraries’ world-class collections of early editions of Shakespeare’s plays, other early modern drama, and manuscripts relating to the study of Shakespeare. On display are the First Folio, the first […]

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The first Scottish printed Bible

Page from the Bassandyne Bible Today is the last day of our Reformation display, and for a final post I would like to write about the first Bible printed in Scotland, generally called the Bassandyne Bible, after its printer Thomas Bassandyne. Bibles certainly circulated in Scotland before the Bassandyne Bible was published – printed editions […]

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