Modern Scottish Collections

We’ve recently bought a rather beautiful collaboration from Galloway by the poet Mary Smith and the artist Silvana McLean Voices from Glentrool. Mary Smith has had an interesting career which has included working on the research for the Dumfries segment of National Theatre of Scotland’s very first production Home, which features in our current exhibition Curtain Up : 40 years of Scottish Theatre. More about the background to the Glentrool project and some striking examples of the contents here.

This week’s intake contained a good variety of Scottish items including the latest in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. The double comfort safari club sees Mma Ramotswe investigating a series of strange events in a safari club in the north of Botswana. The National Library of Scotland has also received an audio book copy of this title.

Also received this week was The guidman’s daughter, a collection of poetry by Henry Marsh. Henry was born in Broughty Ferry and currently lives in Midlothian. This volume of his work contains a sequence of poems based on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Another new addition to the collections was Empty, the first play by Scottish novelist Cathy Forde. Empty was first performed by the National Theatre of Scotland at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow in March 2010. You can view Cathy’s blog about Empty here. Cathy was also the 2009/2010 virtual writer in residence for the Scottish Book Trust.

Other recent arrivals were two volumes in the History of everyday life in Scotland series published by Edinburgh University Press. A history of everyday life in twentieth-century Scotland edited by Lynn Abrams and Callum G. Brown examines the reinvention of Scottish culture and society over the course of the 1900s, looking at everyday life, identity, possessions and culture. A history of everyday life in Scotland, 1600-1800 edited by Christopher A. Whatley and Elizabeth Foyster looks at the culture and society of Scotland during the 17th and 18th centuries, which witnessed the significant impact of agricultural mechanisation and the emerging industrial revolution on everyday life. Future books in the series will examine the period from 1800-1900 and medieval Scotland.

Designers, curators, and technicians are now on site in our George IV Bridge building installing Curtain Up : 40 years of Scottish theatre our new exhibition which opens on Saturday 19 December. I’m currently finishing off information on various Scottish playwrights for the final section of the exhibition. That’s the bit where visitors will be able to sit down and dip into printed plays and delve into the careers of various writers. Today the costumes are going in – these include the big dress Siobhan Redmond wore in the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Mary Stuart. Next week I’ll be part of the team getting the items into the cases and the images on the walls. Photograph by Manuel Harlan, courtesy of National Theatre of Scotland.