The Great Affair is to Move: Travel and Topography at the Signet Library
Reading time: 2 minutes
Lancashire, Cheshire and Derbyshire, from Charles Leigh’s Natural History 1700
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); and WS Society staff (who bear responsibility for errors etc).
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