Art and The Playfair: Speaking to Absent Volumes, or How to Find Books in the Library, Old Style TAGS: Art project | artists' books | catalogues | Edinburgh College of Art | Inventories | Playfair library During the academic year 2019-20 Rare Books worked with a group of third year students from Edinburgh College of Art.  The project was to produce an artist’s book in response …Continue reading →

Rare Book Cataloguing: The Case of the Blurry Page Sometimes in rare book cataloguing you come across something that requires you to flex you analytical bibliography muscles. It can be amazing what you can gather from the study of …Continue reading →

Rare Books – Expect the Unexpected 4 TAGS: Abstract | Arctic Monkeys | book illustration | Busan | Edinburgh | Edinburgh College of Art | fork | Goff | Golf | Illustration | Jessica Ennis-Hill | Korea | lace | Leith | Notgeld | Nottingham | Scottish independence | Sean Bean | Sheffield | Special Collections Lace, Forks, The Arctic Monkeys and Golf This is the fourth in our series of posts based on the current exhibition in the Library Gallery, and the project by Edinburgh …Continue reading →

Rare Books – Expect the Unexpected: 2 TAGS: Edinburgh College of Art | Illustration | Jesuits | Notgeld | political cartoons | Robert Parsons | Robert Persons | Satire | Spanish Armada | Trump Satire This is the second in our series of posts based on the current exhibition in the Library Gallery, and the project by Edinburgh College of Art Illustration students, based …Continue reading →

Rare Books – Expect the Unexpected. 1 TAGS: Edinburgh College of Art | Illustration | Notgeld A Sense of Place If you have been passing the Main Library recently you will have seen the exhibition in the Library Gallery on the ground floor, of some of …Continue reading →

Travelling Images: Venetian Illustrated Books 2 This week our Venetian illustrations turn theatrical, with an illustrated copy of the plays of Plautus, and we welcome as guest blogger, the exhibition curator, Laura Moretti, of the University …Continue reading →

Early Library Records TAGS: catalogues | enlightenment | old library | palaeography | shelf lists Our intern, Nathalie, is reaching the end of the project, working on the earliest of the library records.  She has achieved a great deal in the weeks she has been …Continue reading →

Alice’s Adventures in the Rare Book Stacks TAGS: Alice in Wonderland | book illustration | Children's stories | John Tenniell | Lewis Carroll | printing history Happy 150th anniversary of the second edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland! (This week’s blog post has been contributed by Tess Goodman, a doctoral student in the Centre for the History …Continue reading →

The Greatest Gaelic Book Collector? Professor Donald MacKinnon (1839–1914), the University of Edinburgh, and the MacKinnon Collection TAGS: Book collecting | Crofters | Gaelic | Highlands | Professor of Celtic | Scotland We have recently completed the online cataloguing of the MacKinnon Collection, of books of and about Scottish life and literature, and rich in books in Gaelic.  Our colleague and expert …Continue reading →

University of Edinburgh joins IIIF Consortium as a Founding Member The University of Edinburgh has joined the International Image Interoperability Framework Consortium (IIIF) as Founding Members. On Tuesday 26th April, the formal agreement was signed between Gavin McLachlan, Chief Information …Continue reading →