Scottish Genealogy

Thursday 30 June 2011

New exhibition at the National Library of Scotland: Banned Books

From the 24th June there has been a new exhibition running at the National Library of Scotland which highlights censorship of published works throughout recent and not so recent times. 

From Lady Chatterley's Lover to an issue of the Woman's Weekly magazine [I'm not kidding!] the exhibition looks at books that have been banned or censored as well as dealing more generally with censorship and the relationship between authors and censors.

Find out more about how attitudes have changed [or, sometimes more surprisingly, not changed] over time in this fascinating exhibition. Topics include racism, sexism, attitudes to euthenasia, government censorship and many more.

On a Scottish note, the exhibits include 'The Merry Muses' a collection of bawdy verse taken from a manuscript that was in the possession of Robert Burns's widow, Jean Armour. First published posthumously in 1799, it contains some of his own work as well as songs he collected for the amusement of his friends in the Crochallan Fencibles, an Edinburgh drinking club.

This is a great exhibition and well worth a look if you are in Edinburgh.  It will run until the 31 October this year, but if you can't get here to visit before then why not have a peek at the detailed information that the NLS have provided about the exhibition on their website at www.nls.uk/exhibitions/banned-books.


Image: graur codrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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