In June 2013 phase 1 of the retrospective cataloguing project, Lighting the Past (LtP), began. Under the charge of a Lead Cataloguer, a workforce of part-time students drawn from the undergraduate and postgraduate…
To help celebrate Beer Day Britain (raise a pint at 7pm on 15th June and say ‘Cheers to Beer’!), this week we’re taking a look at some of the beer-related items held in the Library’s Special Collections. St Andrews…
There are a multitude of items which a collector can choose to collect: books, tea pots, figurines, etc. But a collection doesn’t have to be based around one particular form; it can be based around a theme. David Hay…
In the second part of the Collecting and Collections blog series, our Manuscripts Archivist takes a look at the trend of fern collecting, pteridomania. It may be conceded that not all the elegancies of Potichimanie,…
On the 1st of May many St Andrews students choose to take part in the tradition of the May Dip. Taking a dip in the freezing North Sea at dawn on the 1st of May is said to promote good luck in exams. For those students…
Daniel Defoe’s castaway tale, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, was first published 300 years ago on 25th April 1719, Defoe’s debut as a writer of fiction. The first edition did not carry…
This is the first of a new mini-series of blogs which will explore different aspects of the theme of collecting and why collectors collect what they do. The James David Forbes Collecting Prize is open to any registered…
We are happy to announce that the winner of the James D. Forbes Collecting Prize 2018 is Parker Gordon, PhD candidate in the School of English. In this blog, Parker tells us about his winning collection. From today…
A tour around the rare books in the Library’s Special Collections reveals many volumes with bands of cotton tape tied around them. The white tying tape serves to warn staff that the ‘tied’ volume is physically damaged…
Did you fall for our April Fools’ Day joke yesterday? As adorable as the book jackets are, we don’t actually wrap up our books for winter. Our books are kept in environmentally controlled and monitored conditions all…