An exciting day at NLS

I only had about 4 hours to spend at the National Library of Scotland. Their Special Collections Reading Room has a great view, the time that I was there I got to see rain, snow, hail and bright sunshine, dark thunder clouds with high winds fall on the Edinburgh skyline. Weather was different every time I looked up.

I was a bit worried I might not get the manuscripts I wanted at all. I had registered online to be a NLS Reader. I had a brief look at where the Chambers archives are kept by Sally, Manuscripts curator, and was told that the three items I wanted request had to be made by 11:45 to get them by 12:00 noon. At 11:20, my photo for a Reader’s had been taken, and I was waiting for my card to be printed, when one of the other readers behind me in the cafe fell over. The NLS staff person helping me jumped up to help him. She told everyone near by that things were fine, but the reader needed space. Several people offered to call an ambulance, and she said one was on the way (he had had problems earlier) … just then they arrived. She sat there giving the paramedics information. "He was a long time NLS reader, he had had problems before…etc."

So, at 11:37 she was still helping them and then realised I was still waiting for my card. She sent someone else to get it for me. I quickly went to the locker room (it’s like the British Library security-wise) got a plastic bag for my laptop, and then managed to get to the reading room by 11:44. I was going to complain if they didn’t accept my requests, and explain there was medical emergency downstairs, but I did get the 3 manuscripts I wanted.

Two of them contained sales records for Chambers’ encyclopaedia. The other book, I had hoped would have some information about illustrations, but I think the manuscript is actually for different books. I couldn’t find a correlation with the online version of the Guides.

I managed to extract and transcribe pre-sales orders for the 1st edition of the encyclopaedia. I did got some data for the second one, but I was pretty tired by then, and some of the handwriting was hard to read. Oh, to have palaeography skills!

I had a brief talk with Alison about the old money system: pounds, shillings, d for denarius (Latin for penny). I’ll need to find out what what the average pay was for different people, and who could afford this. More fun… statistics and demographics. I’ll have to come back to this after my seminar paper in a few weeks. I need to get that finished relatively soon.