In 1710, the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh was granted the right to claim, from its publisher, a copy of every book published in Great Britain.  So for three hundred years it, along with a select few other institutions, has been steadily, remorsely amassing a vast, almost unimaginable compendium of the written word.  It became the National Library of Scotland, and in 1956 took up its present abode behind an admittedly somewhat forbidding facade on George IV Bridge (a bridge that, by convenient coincidence, does get a mention or two in The Edinburgh Dead, since it was being built at the time of the novel).

Behind that unshowy exterior lies a world of wonder and dreams. It is the manual, analogue internet, and a place, I think, in may ways far richer and deeper and more intoxicating than the digital version that rules our lives now. There are no hyperlinks to guide you, no Google to impose its presumptive structures upon your wanderings. You have to do the work yourself. Hold the books in your hands; read not short, snappy summaries but page after page of considered text; follow trails through quotations and references and indexes. Map out your own exploration, and do it slowly, with care and reflection.

That modest doorway is the portal to centuries of human thought upon every conceiveable subect. The NLS currently holds over 14 million printed items in their collections. 14 million. And it is freely available to anyone with the inclination and cause to investigate it. What a thing. What a wondrous, wonderful thing.

Within, beyond the obligatory cafe (which does rather good tea, by the way – the diligent researcher must know where his restorative refreshments are going to come from) and cloakroom and exhibition space, a relatively modest stairway leads us up towards the light, towards the doors of the reading room.

That’s the doors there, and I took my camera no further, because snooping around in there taking photos seemed unlikely to be welcomed. So we’ll have to make do with this little snapshot I pinched from the NLS’ own website.

The Reading Room’s a modest space – demure – unlike the cavernous, crowded reading rooms of the British Library in London. Always busyish, but never overcrowded. Wonderfully quiet, of course, save for the tip-tap of fingers upon laptops and the occasional cough from the assembled readers.

Who are a diverse lot, as befits the clientele of a national library. Students and academics, of course, but amateur researchers too, hobbyists and genealogists, writers and readers of all sorts. Each one of them in his or her own world, immersed in the mental space created by printed words upon a page; words that have been brought forth from the vast, unseen storage spaces that reside in that same building or other sites around the city like some titanic literary iceberg whose merest, random tip is each day brought forth into the light by the specific requests of those visiting the library.

And while you wait for the books you have requested to be produced for your perusal, you can browse the shelves, where an eclectic selection of stuff awaits your curiosity. That’s where I found the old proceedings and records of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which – like George IV Bridge – can be found within the pages of The Edinburgh Dead. The Society was founded way back in 1780, and is still going today, which makes it almost, but not quite, as venerable an institution as the National Library of Scotland.

Above the door of the NLS, obvious to all as they depart, is a map that says as much as any words can about how deeply into the past go the foundations of the building.  It shows Edinburgh as it was three hundred years ago, when the seeds of the National Library were sown.  The city – and the world – may have transformed around it, but the idea that the Library embodies and fulfils is still there, unchanged.  And a jolly good idea it is too.

Previous instalments of The Edinburgh Dead photo-trailer:

Duddingston Loch

The Arthur’s Seat Coffins

Guarding the Dead

Weaponry

So, What’s a Close, Then?

A fine looking fellow, whatever his moniker.  He’s currently calling the Cairn O’Mohr winery home.  I’m not sure they even know he’s an ent, to be honest, and I didn’t mention it, in case he preferred to remain incognito.

Actually, I do have something else to report, but I suspect it’s of more interest to me than anyone else: best sighting I’ve ever had of a wild otter, paddling about in the River Earn one lunchtime.  I say best sighting – it was only a couple of seconds, but that’s still better than I’ve ever managed before, as far as I can remember.  Still, never mind all that.  Ent!

First saw this on the indispensible SF Signal, by the way.

Yes, it’s a graveyard with a fortified watchtower in it.  Why, you may wonder, would the good citizens of Edinburgh have found it necessary to defend their cemetries with miniature castles?  Here’s a case where the past, when viewed from enough temporal or moral distance, starts to look every bit as unfamiliar as any invented fantasy world.  It’s a pretty well known, if sordid, tale of our past, so will come as no surprise to many of you, but in 18th and 19th century Edinburgh – and a good few other places in the UK, since this was by no means a purely Edinburgh phenomenom – the dead required heavy duty protection of this sort against the living.  Strange, but very much true.

Fresh corpses were so much in demand for dissection in anatomy classes at the then flourishing universities, and in private anatomy schools of which there were a great many, that a veritable industry sprang up: graverobbing.  As I said, a well known tale, so no great surprise.  But this watchtower thing is a particular flourish on the story that I love.  Several of Edinburgh’s graveyards still have them: fortifications from which armed men could keep watch for the dreaded graverobbers (or Resurrection Men, which is the rather more dramatic name for them I prefer).

When you stop and think about it, it’s just too strange for words.  One of the country’s greatest cities had castellated towers in its cemetries, because a certain number of its citizens, including eminently respectable and indeed famed teachers of the medical sciences, were engaged in a racket that involved exhuming the corpses of innocent fellow citizens and cutting them up for the edification of students.  Weird.  And an enormously tempting historical oddity to play around with in fantactical fiction, of course.  Which brings me back to: the manuscript for The Edinburgh Dead will be going to the publisher soon (i.e. weeks rather than months).

The greatest hullabaloo, not unreasonably, surrounds a two for the price of one special offer: the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

Origin of Species would be pretty high on my personal list of most significant books ever published. Nowadays, if Darwin was unleashing his radical ideas upon an unsuspecting world, there’d no doubt be not only the book, but soon enough the TV series, the website, the YouTube channel of explanatory lectures etc. etc. But even now, in this digital age, I can’t help but think it would be the book that really mattered. It would be the book that lasted, and that constituted the most complete prospectus for his theories. All the other, digital, stuff might be seen by more people in the short term, but it would be the book that was the real defining, immortalising statement of his beliefs over future centuries. I think. Or maybe I just hope.

Still, Origin wouldn’t be that high on my list of ‘great reads’. Since one of the many flavours of my geekishness is ‘biological sciences nerd’ (a little known subspecies, that), I did find it interesting when I read it long ago, but the journal of his voyage on HMS Beagle is a bit more of a straightforwardly enjoyable read: an intelligent and observant 19th century traveller visiting places that most of us, even now, will never get to, and thinking about what he sees there in ways that most of us are not capable of. You can get abridged mp3s of it here, and this would be a good year to give it a listen.

I’m halfway through Janet Browne’s giant two volume biography of Darwin, incidentally, and for any fellow biological sciences nerds out there I can thoroughly recommend it.

The other big commemorative party this year, in Scotland at least, is for the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth. I can’t claim to be much of a Burnsologist (though I’m a big fan of Burns Night - especially the food and drink involved) but I’ve always thought he had a certain special something: he wrote populist, accessible stuff, without great literary pretension or elobarate, elitist intent, but he wrote it with such elegance, with such a neat turn of phrase and such an instinct for the rhythms of language, that he sometimes conjured a kind of magic out of apparently simple series of words.

Plenty of people seem to agree with me, since he is a Scottish national icon who is actively and genuinely treasured here (as well as overseas) almost as much as the international publicity and tourist-targeted promotions would have you believe.

So a couple of Burns’ best bits, for your listening/viewing pleasure:

Thou Gloomy December

and, of course, A Man’s A Man For A’ That, first spoken:

and then done in a way I suspect Robert Burns would wholly approve of:

That’s the Isle in question, and very pretty it is too, but here’s the real reason I actually take the hour long boat trip required to reach it:

The birds, obviously. But there’s no denying the place itself is so extremely pleasant it might be worth even if there was nothing with wings within ten miles of it:

The last of the bird pictures, by the way, is an Arctic tern. These are heroes of the bird world, going from the Antarctic to the Arctic and back again every year (and no, Scotland is not quite in the Arctic – for all that it feels like it occasionally. I guess our Arctic terns are ever so slightly less motivated than most of their brethren). Watching them, if you take a moment to reflect that not so very long ago these very birds were surfing the breezes of the Antarctic Ocean, perhaps even dodging Antipodean icebergs, it blows your mind just a little. I think they’re fantastic.

That sentiment is not, it has to be said, mutual. This year, the tern colony has taken a collective decision to locate itself right next to the landing stage. To reach the boat, therefore, you have to run the gauntlet of righteously agitated and protective parents. I am thus able to leave you with this world exclusive video. A brief (and I do mean brief, like 2 seconds brief, so pay attention) clip revealing, for the first time anywhere, the sound a fantasy author makes when the immensely well-travelled beak of an Arctic tern connects with his skull at high velocity:

I’ll be taking in some potentially interesting stuff, including Beowulf, The Bacchae (with Dionysus played by Nightcrawler!), and Stardust. Half the fun, though, you don’t need a ticket for. It’s in the random blizzard of activity, and the sense of semi-organised and mostly good-humoured chaos that engulfs the city. And the dedicated performers going to great lengths to promote their shows:

And that, by the way, was not the first but the second person I saw lying in a coffin on the street within a hundred yards or so. Great minds evidently think alike, though I’m not entirely sure ‘great’ is the operative word here.

The streets heave with tourists, performers, the famous and the not-so-famous, turning the whole city into one giant show (and, supposedly, doubling its population). I’ll be looking for Albannach, who are regulars at this time of year, and put on one of the best street gigs:

All in all, it’s a fun few weeks. It turns out (I discovered via the Woolamaloo Gazette) that this is the last year that the Film Festival will take place during August. They’re shifting it to June from next year. I really like the concentrated insanity that results from having all the festivals going on at more or less the same time. Losing films from the August mix is a bit of a pity. Not that there’s exactly a shortage of other stuff going on, I suppose.