When the John Murray Archive (JMA) arrived at the National Library of Scotland in 2006, approximately 17,500 individuals had been identified as having an item relating to them in the archive. For each of these, their full name, dates and epithet (a little descriptive detail in order to distinguish that particular person) needs to be […]
Tag: writers
Happy anniversary: 10 years of the John Murray Archive at the National Library
With the acquisition of the John Murray publishing archive ten years ago, the National Library of Scotland welcomed the likes of Charles Darwin, Jane Austen and Lord Byron to the collections. Over a quarter of a million letters and publishing papers of some of the greatest names in literature bolstered already outstanding collections. But this was […]
Money and Murray
The thousands of letters that I catalogue as part of the John Murray Archive cover a huge variety of themes. But one topic of conversation that comes up time and again is that of money. This is probably unsurprising. The John Murray Archive is, after all, a business archive. The ledgers and letters largely reflect […]
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 […]
Sunset Song on screen
Film adaptations of Scottish literature have been very much in my mind recently. In November we celebrated Stevenson on screen for RLS Day, and last week I was in Inverness talking about the Hitchcock film version of John Buchan’s The thirty-nine steps – now many of us are catching up with the long-awaited film of Sunset song
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 […]
The pleasure of reading
Antonia Fraser describes herself as an ‘addict’ of the written word. In this revealing book, she brings together more than forty leading writers (writing in the English language) of all ages and from backgrounds a diverse as possible, to explain what inspired their interest in books and what keeps them reading. First published in 1992, […]
H.P. Lovecraft goes to the movies
Monsters from beyond space and time! Alien invaders! Ghouls beneath the city streets! Mad scientists resurrecting the dead! H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is generally acknowledged as the most important American writer of macabre fiction since Edgar Allan Poe and one of the most influential writers of horror tales in the 20th century. With more than 100 […]
Two writers worth revisiting: Violet Jacob and Nan Shepherd
Course members from The Workers Educational Association visited National Library of Scotland last week as part of their Excuse my dust! course, rediscovering Scottish women writers . I introduced manuscripts associated with two writers, Violet Jacob and Nan Shepherd, both of whom deserve a wider reputation.