To be fair, David Baptie spoke highly of the Aberdonian James Davie, an early to mid 19th Century Scottish song enthusiast. He was a friend of the Dundonian song collector James Wighton.
However, correspondence between the two men reveals him writing sour objections to other contemporaries’ activities and opinions. I quoted some of his grumblings in my first book, Our Ancient National. Airs. I formed the impression that he was decidedly irritable in his old age!
Here he is, in characteristic tone at the start of his Caledonian Repository:-
Notwithstanding this, I was excited to accession several books of this Caledonian Repository to the library, since they’re quite rare. The books are tatty and fragile, but a tangible link with the past – they’re about 200 years old.
The Repository is in two series. We have three books from the first and two from the second. Grateful that the tune contents pages were there, I sorted out which pages belonged where, then catalogued them. Oh, my fingers flew. But the last one that I managed to catalogue before 5 pm yesterday, simply didn’t want to play fair. The catalogue entry was done. But, without going into details, it wasn’t displaying properly.
I went home, had tea, opened the laptop and recatalogued that piece using the info I’d already entered.
No luck.
I removed the identifying sequential number and tried again.
Still no luck.
Maybe ‘something’ magical would happen to it overnight? It was too much to hope! Mr Davie, irascible as ever, did NOT want that book to appear properly in our catalogue.
Finally, my line-manager suggested trying to give it a different barcode. I have absolutely no idea why the system didn’t like the one I’d assigned it, but I did as suggested, and hey presto, we have Davie’s Caledonian Repository, Series 2, Book 2, properly catalogued and accessible.
So that left me with Series 2, Book 1 to do this morning. That book has all its pages, but the page numbering is, shall we say, a little quixotic. Mr Davie has had the last laugh there.
Nonetheless, we do now have all five items in the Whittaker Library catalogue. I like to think Davie would be a little bit pleased!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 