An Atheistic Surprise We keep finding things we didn’t know we had!  Special Collections has been playing host to experts from the London firm of specialist booksellers, Bernard Quaritch.  During their investigations they …Continue reading →

American discovery in Special Collections This is the first book to describe and depict native American costume, culture and society for European readers.  It was published in 1590 by the enterprising merchant Theodor de Bry, who identified a market for illustrated …Continue reading →

New donation of Scottish poetry Tessa Ransford, poet activist and founder of the Scottish Poetry Library, has gifted to the University of Edinburgh her personal collection of poetry pamphlets. This is a major new acquisition …Continue reading →

Written in blood This letter means what it says – “This is written in the blood of William Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh on 28th of January 1829”.  The blood was “taken …Continue reading →

We want more corpses In 1828 the University of Edinburgh’s medical students were desperate to get their hands on cadavers – so they could study Anatomy from real subjects.  This amazing document, measuring 190 …Continue reading →

New Zealand Special Collections The New Zealand House Special Collection has now been fully catalogued by our Cataloguing Interns. It contains over 200 fascinating and rare items, dating from 1773 onwards.  These books come …Continue reading →

William Drummond book returns home Rare Books and Manuscripts has purchased a book once in the library of William Drummond, the Scottish poet who gave us most of his books in 1626.  This particular book …Continue reading →

Writing the North: manuscripts travel to Shetland Special Collections has loaned five manuscripts to Shetland Museum and Archives for their new exhibition, “Writing the North”, which celebrates the literature of Orkney and Shetland.  This exhibition is part …Continue reading →

Gaelic week in Centre for Research Collections To celebrate the University’s first-ever Seachdain na Gàidhlig, or Gaelic Week, yesterday CRC displayed a number of treasures from the rare book and manuscript collections.  These included notebooks of folklorist …Continue reading →

Medieval manuscripts behaving badly This 15th century manuscript of the Chronicle of England ends with some rather surprising remarks on the flyleaf: Tritu est perire quod facis ingrato [what you do is lost by thankless wear …Continue reading →