The permanent and free ‘Treasures of the National Library’ exhibition at our main building in Edinburgh gives visitors the chance to see some of the most important items in our collections. We have recently refreshed the contents of the exhibition. From March 2023 you can see the first edition of Robert Burns’s ‘Poems’, printed at […]
Tag: Scottish History
Zoom into Inverclyde
Part of the historic county of Renfrewshire, Inverclyde is situated in the crook of the upper Firth of Clyde as it bends east toward Glasgow. Its largest towns, Greenock and Port Glasgow, were historic centres of shipbuilding. From the eighteenth century they were key ports for the British trade in goods from overseas, including commodities, […]
A spirited correspondence
We have added a rather unimpressive looking pamphlet to our collections. The distillery of Scotland a national benefit (AB.2.215.06) was published in Aberdeen in 1755 and is in the form of two letters to a friend. The anonymous author discusses whisky production of in Scotland in relation to its annual use of 50,000 bolls of […]
A Seriously Old Book
We have recently bought an incunable. Incunabulum is Latin for “things in the cradle”, and the term means an item that was printed before 1501, i.e. during the infancy of printing with movable type. A book’s title page as we know it, with title, subtitle, author’s name, publisher’s name, and date and place of publication, was […]