On the Visit Scotland site, at the Inspire Me! page will be found the link to download the Guide. Professor Riach splits his literary Scotland into 13 geographical areas, offering 60 places to visit and )kept loosing count) around 120 authors.

You start with Shetland and travel south to the Scottish Borders in an amazing compilation, but as he writes, "This is no more than a preliminary sample of the writers and literary locations to be discovered." 

Next time let's hope he won't miss out out Ann Cleeves and the Shetland Quartet  or Charles Murray's Hamewith  or even famous George MacDonald with Malcolm and The Marquis of Lossie or  Eric Robert Linklater  and that Irishman Maurice Walsh with his intimate knowledge and description of the Banffshire and Moray countryside in some of his novels. And as for George Orwell writing 1984 on Jura, well, the Inner Hebrides have quite fallen off our Scottish literary map alas. Damn fine whisky there too!!

But oh, it is a lovely thing and such a time waster, even without bothering to set foot out among the-maybe-sometime-soon daffodills. Start in Shetland, but fall quick victim to the Orkney cathedral which simply soars and you start to follow a different path that's  just a browse through an often vertical Scotland, but you'll catch snatches of George Mackay Brown, and the wonderful Edwin Muir, bump into Compton MacKenzie in Barra and oh, will you look at the verticality of Norman MacCaig's Falls of Measach?

Neil Gunn has the Highland River sculpture of Kenn and his salmon and also is the voice of a way of life and large fishing fleets in The Silver Darlings that has passed away.

And you can see that the Highlands would always sweep Moray and Banffshire away, what with those great names of Sorley MacLean and Hugh MacDiarmid , Ian Crichton Smith and John McGrath.

Aberdeen is of course Byron and James Leslie Mitchell, whose Scots Sunset Song,  and trilogy Scots Quair, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite make little apparent recall of his Hillhead of Segett  farm home, last seen as an empty house, ironically sheltering  combine harvesters.

Johnson and Boswell visited Slains Castle, but it seems Bram Stocker gets the kudos for drew on it for everyone's gothic Dracula.

James Barrie has a museum in Kirriemuir with manuscripts and mementoes. The Fortingall Yew gets its portrait taken thanks to Edwin Morgan's Pilate at Fortingall and Naomi Mitchison's The Bull Calves is in Gleneagles. 

But no room English D K Broster's Jacobite trilogy The Flight of the Heron,  The Gleam in the North (1927) and The Dark Mile (1929) inspired by a five-week visit she made to friends in Lochaber in the Western Highlands in 1923 and maybe James Irvine Robertson's  Lady of Kynachan will get a look in some other time.

You've find Para Handy's Neil Munro at Inveraray Castle, Gerald Manley Hopking's  forever wild 'Inversnaid' as  well as the totally  unlikely scenario of Walter Scott and Jules Vern in Loch Katrine and the Trossachs.  Wouldn't you love to overhear that coversation?

Timor mortis conturbat me' quod Dunbar, along with Robert Henryson, and Sir David Lyndsay to be found in Dunfermline, where the King sits "drinking the blude-reid wine" and calls for the skeely skipper Sir Patrick Spens.   Buchan is given the Forth Bridges, deserved but some might reckon him better served with the borders  as in his  23-year-old  work John Burnet of Barnes.

But hey, if you want just one place to go that scoops William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lyndsay, George Buchanan, James Graham Marquis of Montrose, Robert Fergusson, folklore scholar Andrew Lang  composer F.G. Scott, poet Edwin Muir, his novelist wife  Willa Muir, art critic, John Tonge, poet Hugh MacDiarmid - they were all intermittent residents at  the University  of St Andrew in Fife together with a  a cluster of more modern poets include John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson.

And, you might fall over science fiction great, Iain M Banks in Fife too, just as you could find Charles Stross lurking in Edinburgh where sports the divine Jean Brodie of Muriel Spark, Irvine Welsh, Ian Ranking, J K Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith, R L Stevenson, Walter Scott, Norman MacCaig, Alan Ramsay, Patrick Geddes.
While the Clyde Valley and Glasgow obviously have, thanks to the University such names Adam Smith, Robert Henryson, Alisdair Gray, A J Cronin, Catherine Carswell, William Miller,  Liz Lochhead and Louise Welsh, the Clyde Valley also includes amazing Little Sparta, that has to be seen to be believed, and was created by Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Yes,  the Burns trail begins in Alloway in the Ayrshire and Arran region, but if you hang in there, you'll find Archie Roy's Deadlight and George Douglas Brown of The House with Green Shutters at Ochiltree.  Thomas Carlyle is of course in the Ecclefechan of cakes and maybe data centre fame. Gavin Maxwell's of Ring of Bright Water grew up in Elrig  and has his otter memorial.

Abbotsford near Melrose  was home of Sir Walter Scott,  and it was in the Eildon Hills that Thomas the Rhymer was carried off by the Queen of Elfland. The Scottish Borders are James Hogg territory as well as James Thomson of The Seasons fame, and don't forget Buchan down here. Also included again Walter Scott,  as well as Allan Massie and George MacDonald Fraser.  


CHILDREN TRAVEL THE WORLD OF BOOKS

This research draws on evidence as far back as 1660's Restoration to the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

It's main focus is on the period in which that new commercial product, books for children, appears to have become established, from the 1740s to the 1820s or 30s.


Readers may be aghast
at the thought of children scribbling over their books, but it's this very activity that has helped to uncover more about the birth of that hugely successful industry.

Dr Matthew Grenby, of Newcastle University, has undertaken his in-depth study to reveal much about the owners of children's books, how they used them and what they thought about,  and it is key to understanding how children's literature became established as a distinct and profitable genre and industry of its own.

The study also challenges many long-held beliefs, such as  that children's literature gradually evolved from instructional books to entertaining ones and  it suggests this specific industry sector may well have emerged much earlier than previously thought.



“We used to think that children's literature meant only those printed works produced especially for children and designed 

to give them spontaneous pleasure,” said Dr Grenby.  “This led to the conviction that children's literature didn't properly come into existence until the 19th century.

"However, for many children the content of the book was irrelevant: their enjoyment was based on the satisfaction of ownership, on their physical relationship with their books, or the status that books and bookishness conveyed.



“Many children enjoyed reading an 'instructional' book despite its didactic nature, often subverting it and making it an object of fun through mischievous annotations and games.”



Dr Grenby found some of the most interesting stories came from surveying the plentiful 'doodles' or marginal marks in early children's books, something never before attempted on such a scale.

Often unconnected with the text itself, much of this delightful commentary gave an unique insight into these early readers. They practised how to write formal invitations, inscribed threatening rhymes to would-be book thieves, frankly discussed their friends and family, or literally drew themselves into the stories.

This echoes intriguing marginal notes and illustrations of very early manuscripts made by  authors or copying scribes,  that were not the main purpose of the work but stray into revelation about people and their personal  interests.


“Although almost always overlooked, even the smallest marginal marks reveals much about how the books are used,” says Dr Grenby. “Scribbled notes can show whether a book was read at home or in school, freely or under supervision, aloud or silently, learned by rote or for fun and how long a child took to read the text - or to grow bored with it.”

Children's ownership and use of books during the 18th century is extremely difficult to determine. They left few records of their purchases, behaviour or attitudes. Most written accounts presenting the adults' views of how children were supposed to think and behave. 



To circumvent this problem, Dr Grenby developed several original methodologies,  around surveys of four important collections of pre-1840 British children's books in Toronto, Los Angeles, Princeton and Bedford, UK.



First, the inscriptions in over 5,000 children's books were surveyed. Many names inscribed were then painstakingly researched, using censuses and parish registers to enable statistical profiling of the early consumers of children's books in terms of age, gender and location, even religion and class. 



During his research it emerges that during the 18th century, a campaign to drive a wedge between books for children and those for adults had been largely unsuccessful. Children continued to cross-read, using both children's and adult texts, often in tandem.

Although publishers were understandably keen to foster the idea of individual ownership, books were often handed down from one generation to the next, or shared between friends and families.



One of the best examples is a copy of Atlas Minimus, or A New Set of Pocket Maps published by John Newbery in 1758. It was initially owned by the Rev Samuel Alford who took it with him to Wadham College, Oxford during his studies, before giving it to his son, Thomas, to use at school.

Thomas became a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and took the book with him to the West Indies. He died on board HMS Triton in 1801 aged 21, but by then he had added detailed, hand coloured sketches of the Caribbean coastlines of Puerto Rico and Tobago during his travels, along with descriptions of battles in which he took part.

“Children writing in a book probably doesn't signify disdain, but rather the opposite,” explains Dr Grenby. “To write in them was to assert ownership of a costly commodity and acknowledge the importance of its place in the owners' lives. This was particularly true for 18th-century children who generally owned very few possessions.”



Most children's books were gifts, particularly from female relatives, and seen by adults and children as tokens of affection, objects of desire and valuable regardless of their content. This 'gift economy' was a driving force behind the rise of children's literature as a successful industry in its own right.


From 1770s onwards, it was evident that girls owned more of the new children's literature than boys - a striking reversal of the position earlier in the century. Initially, there was a one-size-fits-all approach but  increasingly publishers tried to segment the market.

But divisions within children's literature were largely ignored by consumers, with cross-reading of all kinds: boys using girls' books, the rich used reading material designed for the poor, children read adults books (and vice versa).



In pioneering new methodologies this study makes a significant contribution to the emerging field of book history.  The 'extra-textual' marks researched during the study have given a much more objective indication of how consumers regarded early children's books than could be achieved through traditional kinds of evidence.

BOOKS OF THE FUTURE OR CHILDREN"S SLATES? Which leaves the reader to wonder if Amazon's appealing new Kindle  (look how bookish it has become, but no touchscreen, no colour and as yet no price) or the Apple iPad will ultimately win theday in the in the book researchers histories of 2200.  They undoubtedly have appeal, giving mobile, light access to the heavy libraries of study.

And interesting to see if a more booklike type might fare better. Take the dual screen 24oz enTourage Systems’ Pocket eDGe, (below) a 7" tablet on one side, a  6" reader on the other, which offers touch screen, e-reader and notepad, priced at $349 does not have the better 'book feel' coming both with WiFi-enabled hinged LCD and E-Ink screens  and a Wacom Pen for notetaking

Using Google Android OS, provides access to numerous helpful Android apps, it has built-in speakers,  microphone and camera while mobile professional or student can also project presentations through a USB-Video adapter. The battle for who dominates the future world of text is intriguing and will take its time to get there.

 


Footnote: By the by, does anyone know what the paper is that is covering Ian M Banks latest "Surface Detail'?  It has the most tactile, almost suede feel,  very suitably aligned to it's title, but no attribution is given!