The Great Affair is to Move: Travel and Topography at the Signet Library

The WS Society Annual exhibition 2021

Lancashire, Cheshire and Derbyshire, from Charles Leigh’s Natural History 1700 — Lancashire, Cheshire and Derbyshire, from Charles Leigh’s *Natural History* 1700

Introduction

The WS Society Annual Exhibition for 2021 focuses on travel and place. Our team of academics, researchers and consultants have selected prints, guide books, works of local history, historic accounts of travel and ephemera to illustrate a wide variety of approaches to the subject, from the early eighteenth century traveller’s guide to early amateur photography. Not all literature of place was innocent, and our exhibition also records the experiences of travel brought by war, by colonialism and by emigration.

We are delighted as part of this exhibition to present one of the Signet Library’s greatest treasures, the Georgian travel diaries of the famous Edinburgh publisher, writer and politician William Creech (1745-1815). These are the principal surviving record of the journeys to London and to the Dutch Republic taken by the young Creech at a time when he was first establishing himself in his career.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of four short video talks which use items from the Signet Library and the WS Society Archives to tell the stories - always human, sometimes dramatic and even tragic - of “the people of the Signet Library” - Writers to the Signet, Librarians, support staff and craftspeople - whose work over the centuries have built this institution into the historic Palace of Books it is today.

The exhibition is brought to you by: Dr Karen Baston [University of Glasgow and WS Society Historical Consultant]; Friederike Gerken [The Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh]; Jo Hockey [Historic Environment Scotland and WS Society Conservation Consultant]; Fiona Mossman [Librarian of the New Club, Edinburgh and the Supreme Court, Scotland]; Sarah Moxey [National Library of Scotland]; WS Society staff (who bear responsibility for errors etc).

The main exhibition is divided into Virtual Rooms which you can enter by clicking on the images below.

Room 1: Historic Prints and Photographs of Travel

Room 2: As Others See Us: Foreign Travellers in Scotland

Room 4: Georgian and Victorian County Histories and their Art

Room 5: A Glasgow Grocer goes West: Robert McNair and the Sugar Trade, 1750-1773

room 7:

William Creech (1745-1815) by John Plott (reproduced by courtesy of William Zachs)

The travel diaries of william creech 1766-1767

As part of our exhibition this year, we are pleased to present a new departure for the Signet Library in the form of our new digitization and transcription of one of the Library’s great treasures - the travel diaries of the Edinburgh publisher and writer of the Scottish Enlightenment, William Creech. Jo Hockey’s transcription is intended as the first in a new series of digitizations of the Signet Library’s collection of manuscript diaries and journals. To visit the Travel Diaries of William Creech, please click here.

room 8:

overhead camera talks: the people of the signet library

Talk one: thieves and auctioneers

A theft from the signet library in 1843 brings things full circle from the tragedy ten years earlier that changed the signet Library forever.

We begin our series of brief overhead camera talks with a mystery and a tragedy: what did a mysterious 1843 theft from Edinburgh's Signet Library have to do with a fatal accident at an Edinburgh book auction ten years earlier, and what did the great historian and collector David Laing have to do with both?

talk two: the autodidacts

a century’ story of the briilliant self-taught assistant librarians and support staff as told through ws society archival records

In the second of our series of brief overhead camera talks, we introduce the "other" heroes in the history of Edinburgh's Signet Library - not the great lawyers who made history here, nor the famous scholar-librarians who built the Library's remarkable collections, but the assistant librarians, hallkeepers, archivists and cleaners whose remarkable stories are told through the records of their lives preserved in the WS Society Archives.

talk three: sparks fly upwards

a secret room in the signet library opens up two centuries of stories about the tradespeople who have maintained the signet library since it opened in 1815

In the third of our series of brief exhibition talks, we bring the remarkable story of a secret room in Edinburgh's Signet Library - a room still carrying its original Georgian decorative scheme and with it the signatures, drawings and dates of two centuries of tradespeople whose work and skills have maintained the Library since its beginnings.

talk four: the murder scrapbooks

A 1920s tale of killing, false identity and smuggling as told through the signet Library’s roughead collection

In the last of our series of brief overhead camera talks, we offer a dark tale from the remarkable library of a remarkable crime writer and solicitor - William Roughead WS (1870-1952). Roughead's scrapbooks drawn from the 1927 trial for murder of John Donald Merrett are just the start of a story of false identity, gambling, smuggling, war and murder that would not end until after Roughead's death, and then not in Edinburgh, but in the depths of Germany's Black Forest.