We couldn’t resist celebrating St Andrews day with some ‘inspiring illustrations’ of our eponym himself. The cult of St Andrew was actively pursued in Scotland by the 12th century: it was in the interests of the 12th…
This June, the Department of Special Collections launched Lighting the Past, a project to catalogue the 150,000 books not currently represented in the University Library’s catalogue, SAULCAT, or in larger databases…
This week’s inspiring illustrations post is about a photo-mechanical process which I’ve always found to be one of the most evocative ways or reproducing photographs using the permanence of ink: the photogravure. These…
The Friends of the Library are delighted that Emeritus Professor Douglas Dunn will be delivering their Autumn Lecture on Thursday, November 22 at 5.15pm in the Arts Lecture Theatre. His topic, “The Writer in the…
To celebrate the first meeting of the Lectura Dantis Andreapolitana (the St Andrews Lectura Dantis) of this academic year, I spent a bit of time in the stacks finding some great illustrations of Dante’s most famous…
This week’s illustration post is a wonderful blend of the earlier photographic and the highly skilled engraving arts of the 19th century. The beautiful engravings on display here are the result of the labour of…
Here’s a Hallowe’en treat from Special Collections at St Andrews! Featured below is the manuscript poem for Andrew Lang‘s “Ballade of a choice of ghosts” with artwork by Harry Furniss. This item is from the manuscript…
Within our small, but perfectly formed, collection of ‘oriental’ manuscripts, is a fine copy of the Shahnameh, an epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010AD. Based largely (but not entirely)…
On Thursday, 1 November 2012, a day conference dedicated to Andrew Lang will be held in Upper College Hall, St Salvator’s Quad, University of St Andrews. Lang was a student at St Andrews, and resident of St Leonard’s…
In every working library, each day sees a struggle played out between order and chaos. It’s a fact of life that however hard librarians work to impose order, opening the doors to users inevitably means that a measure…