Ian R. M. Mowat, Librarian to the University
Supporters of the Library help us not only to acquire but also to make available important contemporary literary material. In July 1971, for example, Edinburgh University Library acquired, with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund and sources such as the National Fund for Acquisitions and Friends of Edinburgh University Library, the remaining papers of Norman MacCaig (1910-1996), who has been described as "arguably the greatest Scottish lyric poet of the 20th century". MacCaig graduated from the University in 1932 and was a poet all his adult life, publishing his early work in periodicals of the 1930s and 1940s. He published 17 collections of poems culminating in Collected Poems (1985), of which a second edition appeared in 1990; a new and revised edition is at present in preparation. Edinburgh University has purchased the manuscripts of all but one of his collections from Riding Lights to The World's Room (1974) between 1975 and 1976, mainly from endowment funds and with the help of the Friends of Edinburgh University Library and University funds. Now, the archive of Norman MacCaig's papers at Edinburgh becomes comprehensive and joins collections of papers by MacCaig's friends and contemporaries, Christopher Murray Grieve ("Hugh MacDiarmid') and George Mackay Brown.
This latest acquisition comprises the author's own copies of his books with textual alterations and revisions; over 1,500 autograph and typed manuscripts of poems, including good working drafts with revisions and alterations; notebooks; manuscripts of prose writings including a translation (with Hugh MacDiarmid) of Berthold Brecht's The Threepenny Opera; some correspondence; and miscellaneous archival material. The collection also includes some 600 unpublished poems, of which most date from between 1978 and 1992, with some from the earlier period from 1947 to 1978. His commonplace books include transcriptions of Scottish songs (often with music, which he loved), and poems from a wide rang of sources, British, Irish, European and American. His files contain unpublished notes on friends and contemporaries, including Edwin Muir, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch and others, as well as those above.
The papers are held in the University Library's Special Collections Department where, once necessary processing and indexing has been done, they can be consulted by all bona fide researchers in the field of 20th-century Scottish literature who need access to the original manuscripts. Unfortunately, much of the material is written on paper which has already shown its acidity by going brown at the edges. Action is needed urgently to stabilize the paper, and the University Library has been fortunate enough to receive recently $5,000 from an American Friend of the University of Edinburgh, Harry Nagler, to do just that. We are very mush indebted to him. This work will be undertaken in the Library's own conservation department in the near future.
Number of visits
since 4 Mar 99
Last updated on
4 Mar 99