Tartan

I accepted a generous donation of old books to the Library a couple of weeks ago. This presented me, personally, with a bit of a problem because our offices, furniture and contents are being moved around, and I had proudly emptied most of my shelves in readiness. There will be fewer shelves in the other office. And now I had two shelves full of old Scottish music – right up my street – which needed cataloguing.

Most vital priority – get them done before I retire from the Library.
Almost as vital – to get them done before the move on Thursday next week!

Of course, the lovely thing is that they’re books I’ve encountered in various research contexts … the PhD; the Bass Culture project (https://HMS.Scot); the book chapter on subscriptions; and my own forthcoming monograph.

I catalogued like crazy on Thursday and Friday. I’ve catalogued Sammelbande (personal bound volumes) of songs, piano music and fiddle tunes. I’ve shown colleagues books signed by George Thomson. I’ve indexed Gow’s strathspeys and reels. And yesterday I blogged about James Davie and his Caledonian Repository.

But I’ve also just enjoyed handling the music, because sometimes one finds some endearingly human evidence of the scores being used, even to the point of needing mending. It’s quite touching to ponder how much a piece had been used, before it actually needed stitching – here, along a line where the edge of the printer’s block had originally left a dent in the paper:-

Stitched on one side, pasted on the other!

I’ve smiled at Georgian ladies’ stitched repairs to much-loved pieces, noticed with amusement a handful of early Mozart Allan books (yes, including some strathspeys and reels) in a fin-de-siecle Sammelband which had seen better days; spotted piano fingerings pencilled in; and best of all, found a tartan ribbon in a volume dedicated to the Duke of Sussex – his personal copy, which was first sold out of the family’s possession in 1844. His library was dispersed after he died in straitened financial circumstances:-

Nine Scots Songs and three Duetts, newly arranged with a harp or piano forte accompaniment / by P. Anthony Corri
Whittaker Library catalogue entry

This book has the Duke’s family crest on a label pasted inside, and the outer cover is embossed with ‘A F’ (Augustus Frederick), reflecting the monogram on the title page.

Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773-1843)

The tartan endpapers and tartan ribbon between pp.30-31 are a perfect illustration of what I have written about in a chapter on tartanry in my forthcoming monograph. Everyone – whether nobility or commoner – liked a bit of tartan on or inside their Scottish song books, and here, someone even found a bit of tartan ribbon to use as a bookmark.

I have just a few of those books left to catalogue now. There’s an intriguing one without a cover or title page, waiting for 9 am on Monday …! Hopefully, I’ll end up with an empty bookcase again.

I’m just leaving this thought here, as a general observation. I was reading recently about Victoria and Albert, tartan and the phenomenon of “Balmorality”. It would be glib, and wrong, to pronounce that everyone loves tartan, but a lot of people certainly do.

Today, I’m reviewing a book about James Macpherson’s Ossian and its pervasive influence on culture not just in Scotland or Great Britain, but on the continent, too. Again, the actual facts are far more nuanced than this bald statement, but it is clear that, because Napoleon was an enthusiastic fan, a lot of people followed him.

So, there’s a parallel, isn’t there? How often has the approval, or disapproval, of a head of state led to a craze for something cultural, be it the warp and weft of a type of cloth, or the exploits of a misty distant hero?

Image: Child in a Scots Costume, sourced via Art UK. Painting by W H Prape, and now curated by Enfield Museum Service