52 weeks of Reading the Collections has come to an end – thanks to everyone who contributed, read, and shared our posts over the past year! We’re ending the series with our traditional visual index: …
Douglas Dunn published Elegies in 1985 – a collection of 39 poems written after the death of his first wife, Lesley Balfour Dunn, who died in 1981, aged 37, from melanoma of the eye. It was awarded the Whitbread Book…
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…
It all started with a scruffy manuscript recipe book from the 1830s and a few reckless comments about what fun it would be to have a go at trying some of the recipes. I doubt Maia realised that her casual remarks would…
In the summer of 2013, the University Library set out to capture the reactions of academic and library staff when encountering their favourite items from the Special Collections Division. For this project, authors for…
Over the past couple of years we’ve had themes for weekly blog posts throughout the year, beginning with the very popular 52 Weeks of Fantastic Bindings, and followed by 52 Weeks of Inspiring Illustrations. While we…
For the final inspiring illustration of this 52-week series, it could be argued that we have saved the best for the last. This is a book of Psalms (with a liturgical calendar of Sarum (or Salisbury) use), which was…
These vibrant illustrations of the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ and angels come from an Ethiopian psalter purchased for Special Collections last summer. Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian countries, having been…
These beautiful hand-painted pictures of tortoises and turtles were created by Scottish naturalist John Anderson (1833-1900). They feature reptiles found in India, Ceylon and Burma, including the Indian star tortoise,…
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, the renowned Scottish abstract artist, has been attracting a lot of attention this year, with several recent events to celebrate the centenary of her birth. She was born here in St Andrews on 8…