This small manuscript, entitled Kellie Law, was chosen by the winner of the JD Forbes book collecting prize as her choice to join the collections (read the full version here). It forms a eulogy on the beauty of the…
Cataloguing the backlog of early and rare printed books held in the Special Collections Division of the University Library can be a source of surprises. We have to admit, the majority of the books we work with are not…
Einstein said that “if you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales”. To this I would add, if you really want your children to…
In the 1980s there was precious little golf on the TV in the UK. There was no internet and the newspapers were, with the exception of Today, black and white only. If golf was your passion then the only way to capture…
Today, 6 September, is the 300th anniversary of the raising of the Standard of the Jacobite army at Braemar by John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar: “in presence of the assembled thanes, the standard of the Pretender – the…
For this post we will take a look at some of the different bindings and covers of Wuthering Heights in our collections. Some of these covers, pictured above, may look uninspiring at first but they can show how…
Last Monday (10th August) Gillian Hurst, who is in the final stages of an MLitt in Mediaeval Studies, delighted an audience at St Leonards’ Chapel with a recital from the St Andrews Gradual. This lecture recital on…
At the end of July, John Jardine, University Bedellus, retired after 29 years’ service with the University. In that role as mace-bearer, almost the personification of the corporate identity of the institution, John was…
Antony van Leeuwenhoek is widely recognised as the person who discovered the microbial world and I have always been intrigued by this somewhat unusual and eccentric scientific pioneer. Although he received no formal…
This week we are not really reading items from the collections, but more just admiring them, and then hoping that someone out there may be able read them for us. These Burmese manuscripts of the Buddhist scripture…