According to an article in “The Times” published on 26th January 2021 the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a revival in Spiritualism. This is not surprising as historically when people have had to deal with the untimely death of family and friends Spiritualism has made a comeback. Spiritualism is a belief that spirits of the […]
Tag: social 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, […]
Virago Modern Classics celebrate 40 years of rediscovering forgotten novels
When Hilary Mantel returned to Britain in 1982 after living in Botswana for five years she noticed unfamiliar green book spines everywhere. She discovered that these were Virago Modern Classics and recognised them as a change for the better in the world of publishing. Virago was founded in 1975 by Carmen Callil, Marsha Rowe and Rosie […]
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 […]
Forty Years Gone: New Wave and Disco in 1978
The year 1978 saw a changing of the guard in popular music. The decade-long dominance of heavy blues-based rock was coming to an end and in its place two new genres, new wave and disco, would rise to attain massive worldwide popularity while at the same time becoming templates for popular music up to the […]
The Fight for Fife
Guest Blog Post by Matthew Fellion As a volunteer in Archives and Manuscript Collections, Matthew Fellion has been listing the records of the North East Fife Conservative and Unionist Association (NEFCUA), which the Library acquired in autumn 2017. Acc.13853 is part of the Library’s modern political manuscript holdings, which include records of Scottish political parties, […]
‘Engraved in the Flesh’: Tattoos in History
On the ground floor of the Surgeons Hall Museum in Edinburgh there is a glass jar with a piece of skin. On this skin is the tattoo of a lady. This tattoo is discolored and disfigured by chemicals and age. Any other information is purely speculative. We don’t know who created the tattoo, who bore […]
One year in the photo-wilds of the National Library of Scotland
The Exploration of a Mountain of Photographic Material by an Icon Intern American pioneering mountaineer and explorer Fanny Bullock Workman’s book Two Summers in the Ice-wilds of Eastern Karakoram: The Exploration of Nineteen Hundred Square Miles of Mountain and Glacier was the inspiration for the title of this piece as I feel it accurately summarises […]
The pulp novels of Nat Karta
One of the main aims of the National Library of Scotland is to collect a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom and in particular every book published in Scotland. Inevitably we miss a few items. Recently we were delighted to plug a small hole in our collections dating from the late 1940s […]
Utopian Nostalgia: Murray Grigor’s Space and Light (1972)
“The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia.” Svetlana Boym One of the Moving Image Archive’s treasure troves is a collection of films produced for Films of Scotland, an agency set up by John Grierson for the Empire Exhibition of 1938 to make films promoting Scotland’s social, cultural and industrial heritage to the […]