A Journal of the Deacon Brodie Summer:

The Diary of George Sandy 1788

George Sandy as librarian to the writers to the signet 1804 to 1805

Following the deaths of the four Writers to the Signet – Deputy Keeper John Davidson, Samuel Mitchelson, William Tytler and David Erskine – who had done most to drive its growth in during the eighteenth century, the WS Society’s library found itself briefly rudderless. In 1804 a committee was created to rescue the situation. George Sandy, who had become a Writer to the Signet in 1798, sat on the committee and volunteered himself to take charge of bringing the library up to a standard that the reputation of the Society demanded.

 What followed was remarkable. By the autumn of 1805, Sandy had not merely brought the daily administration of the Library up to a high level but he had issued a new printed classified catalogue with an index and two supplements covering 1863 titles in great detail. Entries for complex publications such as encyclopaedias or the collected papers of intellectual societies might run for several pages, listing every individual subject area or the title and author of every paper.

 The response was no less extraordinary. Copies of George Sandy’s catalogue were presented to major libraries, and the WS Society archives contain the response from Joseph Planta, the Swiss-born Principal Librarian of the British Museum, who  concluded by remarking that “I cannot but admire the ingenious and elaborate manner in which it has been executed, and to express a wish that it may serve as an example to all those who shall hereafter be charged with the useful but arduous undertaking of composing catalogues of public libraries.”

Thomas Horne’s 1814 Introduction to Bibliography (the first work known to have been part-researched at the Library) praises “one of the best arranged catalogues, on De Bure’s system, that has ever been printed.” (In constructing his Catalogue, Sandy was working on a basis evolved by Guillaume de Bure (1732-1782) in his 1763-68 work Bibliographie Instructive). As late as 1917, in a paper to the Glasgow Bibliographical Society, the great lawyer and historian Dr. David Murray said of Sandy’s catalogue that it was “still useful on account of the abstracts it gives of voluminous works..(it is ) in the Circle in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and (is) amongst the most useful of the catalogues placed there for reference”.

There is every chance that George Sandy’s relationship with the Signet Library began in his childhood. His Diary relates his corralling of his own books and those of his friends into “the Library” of the “Society of Independent Friends” which he ran with a rod of iron in its few short months of existence. The Catalogue of Books contained in his Diary follows to some extent the pattern of the 1778-86 manuscript List of Books Belonging to the Society of Writers to the Signet which may be in the hand of Alexander Alison, who as Underkeeper of the Signet had kept a kind eye on the welfare of the young Sandy following the death of his father. The fresh literary energy flowing through the WS Society under Deputy Keeper John Davidson after 1778 would have found its way into the Sandy household and Sandy’s formative years would have witnessed the Signet Library’s rapid growth and development at that time.

 Shortly after the completion of the catalogue, George Sandy left his role with the library to take up the post of Secretary to the Bank of Scotland that would occupy the rest of his professional life. His successor, Macvey Napier WS, could not have asked for a better platform to work from than that left him by Sandy. Although Napier was the first to hold the title of Librarian to the Society of Writers to the Signet as an official office of the Society, George Ballantyne’s The Signet Library and its Librarians 1722-1972 quite justly instates Sandy as the first of the line of scholarly librarians who would grace the office until well into modern times.