The Signet Library 200th Anniversary Online Exhibition

signet library collection guides

Signet Library Collection Guides

The Signet Library is one of the most important collections of Scottish books, manuscripts and papers and one of the largest private libraries in Britain. This part of the exhibition will build into a permanent and extensive series of online guides to the Signet Library’s collections for researchers and scholars.

We begin with our new Guide to the Signet Library’s Collection of Scottish Session Papers. Session Papers are the printed arguments of Scotland’s Advocates as presented in civil cases in the Inner House of the Court of Session. Their authors include some of the most significant figures in eighteenth century Scottish writing and thought and they are thought by many to represent the largest untapped historical resource for the period of the Scottish Enlightenment. This guide contains indexes and finding aids to the collection, and describe the collection’s origins, history and importance. Click here to enter the guide.

We continue with our guide to the Thomas Annan Collection of Early Photography. Of Annan's specific contributions to this collection, his photographs of the University of Glasgow's pre-railway site on the High Street are of particular importance to the Signet Library as they represent the only significant set of photographs taken of a building designed by Signet Library architect William Stark in its original unaltered condition.

The Mary Queen of Scots Collection contains about two hundred historic books on the life, reign, and controversies of Mary Queen of Scots. It was one of the library's first designated special collections and contains examples of most of the significant published output about her from a period within her lifetime until well after the Great War. The collection contains material in at least seven languages, written across five centuries and varying from short anonymous political pamphleteering through to luxurious, richly illustrated Victorian quartos and everything in between.

The Napier Collection John Napier of Merchiston (1550-1617), the inventor of logarithms and transformer of the means by which complex arithmetical calculations were made, was Scotland’s greatest mathematician and a man to bracket alongside Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister and Alexander Fleming. The Napier Collection contains rare early editions of each of Napier’s five works - one theological, four mathematical in nature. Also present are translations into European languages. Part of the collection was gathered by Macvey Napier WS during his golden librarianship of 1805-1837, but a large proportion is drawn from another great Napier collection, that of William Rae Macdonald (1843-1923), the actuary and antiquarian and translator of Napier. Click here to visit the collection guide.

The 1745 Collection The 1745 Collection is an umbrella title encompassing materials about the entire recognised period of Jacobite rebellions from 1688 until the dying of the echoes after the 1745 rebellion met its doom at Culloden. The largest part of the collection consists of printed accounts and memoirs, along with a substantial collection of contemporary pamphlets and printed ephemera, but there are also contemporary manuscripts, and a link to one of the first great projects in the history of Scottish contemporary historiography. Click here to visit the collection guide.

The Signet Library Almanacs Collection is one of the largest in private hands and extends from scarce examples of Aberdonian almanacs of the seventeenth century through owner-annotated eighteenth century almanacs to the steam-printed, mass-produced Oliver and Boyd almanacs of the twentieth. Jo Hockey’s illustrated essay combines significant examples from the collection with a discussion of the different roles and purposes served by almanacs in all their forms since ancient times.

Further Collection Guides are in preparation, which will include:

The Fletcher Collection (books by and about the Scottish politician and patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun 1655-1716, many donated by the historian of the Romani people Robert Macfie)

Voyages and Travels (one of the Signet Library’s great historic collections, including travel literature and illustration by Scots overseas and travel memoirs by British, European and American travellers in Scotland)

The Scottish Enlightenment Collection (a collection of important early editions from Scottish, English and French publisheers of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, economists, historians and theologians)

The William Roughead Collection (the working library of the great twentieth century Scottish historian of crime William Roughead WS 1870-1950, including much unique printed material and manuscript letters and documents)

Encyclopedias and Dictionaries (including Johnson’s Dictionary, Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scots Language and every edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica including presentation sets donated by Britannica’s editor and Signet Librarian Macvey Napier)

The Edinburgh Collection (containing practically every work on the city’s history written before 1960: a panoply of the astonishing, beautiful and often surprising bibliography of Scotland’s Inspiring Capital)

The Librarian’s Collection (important European books from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century on history, theology, travel and memoir. These were brought together by Signet Librarian Dr. Charles Malcolm during the Second World War along with a large collection of auction and library catalogues and works on bibliography and librarianship)

Historic Newspapers Collection (The Signet Library’s collection of historic newspapers, from the civil war publications of the seventeenth century through to Polish and Dutch newspapers printed in exile during the Second World War)