Reading the Collections, Week 39: Rejlander’s ‘The two ways of life’ (c. 1857)
I must’ve been 14 or 15 when my parents brought home a piece of software that would literally change their professional lives and would become an everyday tool of my […]
Tag: Photographic Collection
Reading the Collections, Week 38: Precognition Statements, Receipts, and the Making of ‘St Andrews – In The Footsteps of Old Tom Morris’
This week we have a guest post by Roger McStravick, a golf history writer specialising in St Andrews, Old Tom Morris and legends from 1800s to 1920. He made use […]
Reading the Collections, Week 36: The Govan Album
Alexander Govan was a chemist and druggist in St Andrews during the 1840s and 1850s. With the new art of photography then in its infancy, he supplied chemicals to the […]
Reading the collections, Week 31: The Lawrence Levy Collection
In the 1980s there was precious little golf on the TV in the UK. There was no internet and the newspapers were, with the exception of Today, black and white […]
Contemporary Calotypists visit Special Collections to View Early Calotypes and Photographic Prints
This past week, Special Collections helped host the bi-annual meeting of The Calotype Society, a modern day take on the original photographic exchange circles that sprung up here in Scotland […]
Reading the Collections, Week 9: Cartes de Visite
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. So, famously, begins The go-between by L.P. Hartley. I was a visitor to that foreign country recently; my passport, the cartes […]
52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 50: How to Varnish a Collodion Plate
Back in Week 15 of our Historical How-To’s, we created some collodion wet plate negatives. It is here that I must confess we did not actually finish the job. Any […]
52 Weeks of Historical How-to’s, Week 48: How to Borrow a Library Book!
So, this week, I thought I’d take a look at how to borrow a library book – after all, this is a library blog! I’ve chosen something a little more […]
52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 43: How to Play Golf
While the 250,000 photographs within the Lawrence Levy Collection comprise a sizeable chunk of the Special Collections’ golf holdings, the other photographs and books hold many precious gems. One of […]
52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 40: lace making
This week’s historical how-to relates to my own interest as a bobbin lace maker and a curiosity…