Our first event in our 140th anniversary season is a fascinating talk about the rise in reading that led to the growth of societies like ours.
Professor Kate Halsey will reveal the people who were visiting the early Scottish libraries and what they were borrowing.
Professor Halsey will discuss research findings from a recent academic project, ‘Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers’, which analyses and interprets borrowing registers, to come to some conclusions about reading habits in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
There are eighteen libraries in the project, including two Borders libraries: Selkirk Subscription Library and Westerkirk Parish Library. Selkirk was mainly patronised by the middle and gentry classes around Selkirk, although it also allowed access to Prisoners of War paroled in Selkirk and the surrounding areas during the Napoleonic Wars. Westerkirk was originally founded by workers in the Louisa Antimony Mine at Jamestown, near Langholm.
Professor Halsey will explore how readers in Scotland engaged with library books as pupils, students, professionals, members of communities and leisure readers. The talk will demonstrate both the importance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century libraries to their local communities, and how historic library borrowing records can reveal rich, complex and idiosyncratic readers.
Admission £6. All welcome.
Tuesday 9th September, 7.30pm, Ormiston Institute, Melrose.
Also check out other Workshops in Melrose.
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