Rare Books @ NLS

Today is National Poetry Day! I’d like to celebrate this event by showcasing how a poem can act as a link between nations, in this case between Scotland and Germany.

In 1802, Walter Scott published his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Bk.5/1.3-4), a collection of “historical and romantic ballads, collected in the southern counties of Scotland”, as the subtitle said. One of these poems, ‘O gin my love were yon red rose’, was translated by Wilhelm Grimm, one half of the brothers of fairy tale fame, into German. He published this poem both in the Scots original and on the facing page in German translation along with two other Scottish ballads in a small booklet entitled Drei altschottische Lieder (5.637(13)),  i.e. Three Old Scots songs. A copy of this small book is on show in the Grimms Treasure display.

Here is a transcript of the poem ‘O gin my love were yon red rose’, which, according to the Lay of the last minstrel, comes from Mr Herd’s manuscript:

O gin my love were yon red rose,           �
That grows upon the castle wa’,       �
And I mysell a drap of dew,                                       �
Down on that red rose I would fa’.        �
O my love’s bonny, bonny, bonny;                         �
My love’s bonny and fair to see:
Whene’er I look on her weel far’d face,      �
She looks and smiles again to me.

O gin my love were a pickle of wheat,
And growing upon yon lily lee,
And I mysell a bonny wee bird,
Awa wi’ that pickle o’ wheat I wad flee.
O my love’s bonny, &c.

O gin my love were a coffer o’gowd,
And I the keeper o’ the key,
I wad open the kist whene’er I list,
And in that coffer I wad be.
O my love’s bonny, &c.

You can read more about Walter Scott in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (accessible through NLS Licensed Digital Collections).
Have a look at Edinburgh University’s Walter Scott Digital Archive for more information on the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

Our Shakespeare exhibition has finished, but it still lives on in our Digital Gallery in the form of two different features.

Shakespeare Collected allows you to explore the collectors and collections we celebrated in our exhibition, through text, films, and images. You can also follow in the footsteps of the collector James Halliwell-Phillipps and build your own Shakespeare scrapbook, to be downloaded or shared. The scrapbook feature is also available as an app free from the Apple app store, with an Android version soon to follow.

The Showcase in Shakespeare Collected Showcase contains a selection of fully-digitized books and manuscripts from those displayed in the exhibition. You can read early editions of Shakespeare plays, including quarto playbooks and extracts from the First Folio of 1623. Some were annotated by editors and others used as prompt copies in 17th-century theatres. You can also see the Shakespeare scrapbook created by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps which inspired our Shakespeare scrapbook activity – we hope it will inspire you to create your own scrapbook too.

Getting Started with Shakespeare: Exploring Scenes and Sonnets is a resource aimed at primary and secondary schools, with lesson plans, images and interactive resources to introduce children to Shakespeare and help them get creative with art, drama and writing.

We hope visitors to our Digital Gallery will look at both of these features – writers of all ages can experiment with our interactive sonnets, and teachers and pupils can discover how Shakespeare’s plays first appeared in print, and share scrapbooks.

Of course Shakespeare lives on in performance: I was interested to see that this week Edinburgh Theatre Arts is presenting the world premiere of a play which was displayed in our exhibition – Macbeth In Scots, using the modern translation by R.C.L. Lorimer.

Until Sunday January 8th, you can see original editions of both the King James Bible of 1611 and the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays from 1623 on display at NLS – not quite side by side, but close enough to compare, in their two separate exhibitions. The King James Bible is at the centre of our Treasures display, which Anette blogged about in November, and which will close on Sunday, and the First Folio is in our Beyond Macbeth exhibition, which runs until the end of April. Both are surrounded by other early editions – the translations which preceded and rivalled the King James Bible, and the quarto playbooks in which individual plays were published.

It’s very interesting to compare the circumstances under which the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare were published in early modern Britain, and the similarities and differences in the appearance of the final printed volumes. A whole book could be written about this subject, but in this blog entry I just want to mention a couple of things which strike me – one way in which they are similar and one in which they are very different. Continue reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible

After our display marking the anniversary of the Scottish Reformation, we travel back in time half a century for our new Visitor Centre display, to celebrate the completion of the printing of the Aberdeen Breviary in 1510. The Aberdeen Breviary, so called because it was compiled under the direction of William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, is the book for which printing was originally introduced to Scotland, and the most substantial work to survive from the printing press of Chepman and Myllar, the first Scottish printers.

To mark the anniversary, we have teamed up with Aberdeen University to display books and manuscripts from both our collections. This display, running from 5 November 2010 to 9 January 2011, sets the Breviary in context. Firstly, the context of the kinds of manuscript liturgical books which existed in Scotland before the coming of the Breviary – which gives us the opportunity to display some of our most beautiful and important illuminated manuscripts.

Secondly, the context of the kinds of books being printed elsewhere in Europe, which were imported into Scotland during this period: on display are some of the earliest printed books to be read in Scotland.

Thirdly, the context in William Elphinstone’s Aberdeen. Besides being an active bishop who was concerned with the fabric and worship of his cathedral, Elphinstone also founded King’s College, Aberdeen. Through the scholars, scholarly methods, and books which he brought to the city, Elphinstone made it a centre of Renaissance ideas.

And finally, the afterlife of the Aberdeen Breviary. Although it does not seem to have had a wide or long use across Scotland, the Breviary’s compilation of material about Scottish saints has had a far-reaching influence which is still felt today.

This exhibition is the final stage in our celebration of the coming of print to Scotland. We marked King James IV’s granting to Chepman and Myllar of a license to print books in 2007, and celebrated 500 years of the Scottish printed word with our exhibition Imprentit in 2008.

As with the Reformation display, we’ll be blogging about the items in the exhibition during its run, and you can also find out more on our Treasures Exhibition webpage.

“The Bull and Luther” is not a pub name I’m aware of, but I like it! This title takes us right back to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation: to 31 October 1517, which is regarded as the start of the Reformation in Germany. On that day, the monk and divinity professor Martin Luther (1483-1546) posted 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

There was nothing unusual about this actual procedure; Latin theses to be discussed in academic disputations were posted publicly. It was the topic of Luther’s 95 theses that caused the controversy: “The power and efficacy of indulgences”. An indulgence was a written statement issued by the Church which promised absolution for sins to the person named on the indulgence in return for money: basically, people paid instead of repenting. They even took their indulgences to confession, and presented them to the confessor (the priest who heard their confession) when he came to announce their penance.

In the early 16th century, the Church was in particular need of vast sums of money: wars against the Turks had to be financed, and St Peter’s Basilika in Rome was being built. The trade with indulgences was thriving, and people who could afford it were quite happy to fork out money in order to reduce their time in purgatory.

Luther’s theses forcefully attacked this practice, and as a result, in June 1520 Pope Leo X issued a bull against him. A papal bull is a letter or edict given out by the Pope; the Latin word bulla means a metal seal, and their titles are usually taken from the first couple of words of the text of the bull. This particular one was called Exsurge Domine (’Rise up oh Lord’): it threatened Luther with excommunication if he did not recant 41 of his 95 theses. He didn’t. Instead he produced a reply in the shape of a tract called On the freedom of a Christian. He sent a copy of it to the Pope, and on 10 December publicly burnt the papal bull in Wittenberg. He was subsequently excommunicated.

Luther’s ideas quickly spread to Scotland through printed books and tracts imported from Europe: one of the key points about the Scottish Reformation that we hope this exhibition will show is how strongly Scottish reformers were influenced by Luther before Knox and his colleagues made Calvinist ideas the basis for their new Scottish church.

We are showing a copy of a 1521 German edition of Luther’s tract along with the title page of a 1520 printed copy of the papal bull. Both are on display by kind permission of Lord Crawford. They form part of the Crawford Reformation Tracts Collection.

The Crawford Collections also contain Latin, German and English indulgences which you can consult in the Library.

The latest display in our Visitor Centre has just opened: throughout September and October, a small exhibition of rare books and manuscripts will mark the 450th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation. We plan to blog about some of the items here during the run of the exhibition, which will give us a chance to tell their stories in more detail than the limits of an exhibition label permit.

At the centre of the exhibition, of course, is John Knox, and copies of The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women and some of his other books are on display.

But we also hope to show other aspects of the Scottish Reformation such as its strong links with what was happening in Europe. For instance, books by earlier reformers – Patrick Hamilton’s theology and the Wedderburn brothers’ poetry – show how quickly Luther’s ideas had an impact on Scots. We wanted to show the other side of the story too, so there are books produced and used by the still-Catholic pre-Reformation Scottish church, and items which illustrate the debates between Catholics and Protestants in the 1560s.

Of course, for us as a library, one of the most interesting points is the way that the history of printed books and the history of the Reformation are inextricably linked in Scotland. Had printed books not existed, the history of the Reformation would have been very different; had the Church not needed to distribute books like the Bassandyne Bible across the country, the Scottish book trade would never have developed as it did.

The first Bible printed in Scotland

Look out for more about the items in this exhibition over the next two months – meanwhile, here are some links to media coverage of the display:

• BBC Scotland news story
• Deadline Press news story 
• The Herald news story

And finally, this BBC website has a good basic introduction to the history of the Scottish Reformation.

From 1- 31 May 2010, a new Treasures display at the National Library of Scotland will mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Scottish author and playwright, James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937). Since its first stage production in 1904, Barrie’s most famous work Peter Pan has been endlessly reinterpreted – a new production by The National Theatre of Scotland is currently on tour. This month the anniversary is also marked by celebrations in Barrie’s birthplace of Kirriemuir, Angus, listed on the Barrie 2010 website.

Down through the years both JM Barrie’s works and his personal life have been the subject of examination. Some literary critics, such as George Blake in Barrie and the Kailyard School (1951), disliked Barrie’s home-spun and sentimental portrayal of rural Scottish life in his early ‘Thrums’ stories. Andrew Birkin documented Barrie’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family in the BBC series The Lost Boys in 1978 and again in his fascinating biography, J M Barrie and the Lost Boys, first published in 1979. Birkin also shares his research online at jmbarrie.co.uk. In 2004 Johnny Depp starred as the playwright in the semi-biographical film Finding Neverland.

While JM Barrie is best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan, he was a successful journalist, novelist and playwright, and as a curator working on our exhibition at the National Library of Scotland, it proved difficult to narrow down a selection from his extensive output. If asked to select a favourite though, his first book, Better Dead, jumps out at me. Perhaps not for its literary merits – indeed Barrie himself once said the cover was ‘certainly the best of it’ – but for the excitement that always surrounds a young author’s first book in print. Having failed to find a publisher, Barrie had the work published at his own expense in 1887, with a cover designed by an old school friend showing blood-stained dagger, revolver and coiled rope! Much later in The Greenwood Hat (1930), referring to himself in the third person, Barrie said, ‘Nevertheless from no other book of his had he such a lively rush of blood to the head as when “Better Dead” was first placed in his hands. For a week or more he carried it in his pocket, he felt for it with his fingers, and slipped into passages to make sure that some sentence was still there’. Perhaps only the opening night of Peter Pan could match that excitement!

The JM Barrie display at the National Library of Scotland runs from 1-31 May and opens daily.