Huge congrats to the wonderful @cleoocy.bsky.social who passed her viva today with no corrections!

Went on a holiday and it was totally awesome

Key lime time

I’m collecting literary maps relating to Scotland for a thing. A few examples here. If anyone has suggestions for others, I’d love to hear them 🙏

This v interesting 1787 edition of Robert Burns’s poems has been brutally washed in solvent, probably by a lateC19 collector. This results in super clean pages but also a kind of cancelled, ghost marginalia that has been almost washed away. It’s like the book has repressed memories of a former life

30 years old this year. Still the most important Scottish novel since Lanark.

My new book is out in the world! It advocates a new, regional way of thinking about Scottish literature and Romanticism. It’s been a labour of love that’s seen me through two babies and a global pandemic, can’t wait to hear what people take from it 🙏 link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Armagh Observatory (est. 1790)

Fabulous launch last week of the new phase of History of the Book at Uni of Edinburgh (edition.ed.ac.uk) with a workshop feat. disbound Shakespeare First Folio plays with performance annotation, then lecture on ‘Book Collecting in the Age of Slavery’ from @oldfortunatus.bsky.social

I like to think it’s got a bit of a Necromancy of Thay vibe with that vellum binding

In the archives with my ‘Scotland and the Supernatural’ students today. Highlight was this 1st edition of James VI’s Daemonologie (1597), which quite a lot of them already knew as Shakespeare’s source for Scottish witches and necromancy in Macbeth.

Dug out some early Shakespeare quartos for a thing recently. They’re really nice

Randomly started watching the Costner/Rickman Robin Hood last night and there, surreally imagined somewhere on the route between Dover and Sherwood, it was … 💔

Happy 400th birthday to Shakespeare’s First Folio! Have been in special collections today with this guy instead, 3x rarer NOT THAT IT’S A COMPETITION

I’m a bit late to the party but this is so so good #amreading