Items digitised from Rare Books collections

Here are books, posters, photos and more from the rare books collections at the National Library of Scotland. Some of them are fully text searchable. You can also access them all via the Digital Gallery.

We list the most recently digitised items first.

• Theatre posters 1870-1900
  A glimpse of theatre in 19th-century Edinburgh.
• English ballads
  Over 2,300 broadside ballads, mostly from 19th-century England.
• 'Kidnapped'
  The first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure tale from 1886.
• Jacobite prints and posters
  Portraits and illustrations relating to the Jacobite Rebellions in 1715 and 1745.
• The Aberdeen Breviary
  The church service book that brought printing to Scotland.
• Early Gaelic book collections
  Several hundred books in Gaelic and other Celtic languages.
• Morall fabillis of Esope the Phyrgia
  'Aesop's Fables' put into Scots by 15th-century poet Robert Henryson.
• The Gutenberg Bible
  Our rare copy of the first book printed with moveable type.
• Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect
  The first published collection of poems by Robert Burns.
• Photographs of the south side of Edinburgh
  Arthur Henry Rushbrook's photos taken in 1929.
• Scottish bridges
  Photos of Forth Bridge construction and the Tay Bridge after collapse.
• The spread of Scottish printing
  Read an early item produced in Scotland's first 33 printing towns.
• The word on the street
  Over 1,800 broadsides with news and ballads from 1650 and 1910.
• Playbills of the Theatre Royal Edinburgh
  A selection of playbills from an important 19th-century theatre.
• The Moir Rare book collection
  An introduction to John William Moir's collection of beekeeping books.
• James VI and the Union of the Crowns
  An introduction to the union of 1603 and the monarch behind it.
• Pencils of light
  Two early photo albums from Edinburgh Calotype Club.
• The photographs of John Thomson
  A small selection of the work of the Victorian photojournalism pioneer.
• Scottish history in print
  Two Jacobite sources and a guide to historical documents.
• Scottish decorative bookbinding
  Examples of bindings from our collection which spans 500 years.
• The first Scottish books
  Nine of the earliest books printed in Scotland, in or around 1508.

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