My first trip to Scotland turned into a bountiful book run. This is always the situation whenever I visit a country for the first time. I found more books than I could have ever dreamed on the topics I love most: islands and languages. In fact, after our visit to Aberdeen, the Orkneys and Inverness, I could only take down book titles as I knew my check-in weight allowance was already busting the limit. By that time I was kneeling in bookstores writing down book titles on scrap paper. Fortunately the titles I recorded were all for current editions and I only bought one book during my last week in Scotland, since it was second-hand, when we were in Edinburgh. I figured I could always order the newly-published books and pay the shipping charges. Who knows, I might even find out that they were available from Canadian publishers as well. In any case, I simply would not be able to carry home all the books I wanted, and the shipping charges might even out with the airline excess baggage weight fees, which are known to be exorbitant. I had to be frugal with second-hand books that captured my interest as well. Since I was already curtailing my book purchases while in Inverness, I selected then put back a dictionary of the Shetlandic idiom. I decided, with the exceptions I have here, not to buy any more books on the Shetland Islands during this trip. I would concentrate on Orkney first and upon a return visit to Scotland when I planned to see Shetland then, go crazy buying everything Shetlandic. Among the books I put back were surprisingly thick second-hand treasures on the main Shetland town, Lerwick.
My book trek started after we took the train from Manchester to Edinburgh, then transferred to Aberdeen, where we spent the afternoon before catching the ferry to Kirkwall, the largest town in the Orkney Islands. We stumbled across the Mercat Bookshop that had unbelievably low prices. It was the polar opposite of the Town Square Book Stop in Gander. The first two books below, on St. Kilda, were purchased there for £1 each.
I will write about my book purchases grouped by their subject matter, versus by the location where I got them. Let’s start first with books about the Scottish islands. Most bookstores, whether retail or second-hand, have large sections devoted to Scotland, and indeed most have sections strictly on the Scottish islands. I had no trouble finding exactly what I was looking for, since these sections were often subdivided based on each individual island. I have a fascination for the small St. Kilda archipelago, the most remote of the Outer Hebrides:
A St Kilda Handbook was published in 1979 and is a brief 95-page introduction to the archipelago. It contained many maps and black-and-white photos. This was the first book I bought in Scotland. It had been pushed to the back of a bookshelf behind other books and when I fished it out I let out an audible Wow.
Just moments after I bought the handbook above I found The Prisoner of St Kilda: The true story of the unfortunate Lady Grange by Margaret Macaulay. I had read about the horrible fate that befell Lady Grange in the early eighteenth century. Her drama could have been lifted straight out of a soap opera: following an acrimonious separation from her husband the Lord Grange, she was abducted and taken to several island locations, including St. Kilda. Truth is stranger than fiction, indeed.
An Isle called Hirte: History and Culture of the St Kildans to 1930 by Mary Harman was published in 1997. Note the title on the cover does not match the one on the full title page (which is the one that counts). At only 338 pages this is nonetheless quite a heavy book. I bought it, as well as the three St. Kilda books below, at Leakey’s Bookshop in Inverness. That store had the biggest selection on Scotland I had ever seen, and the Scottish islands section covered multiple long shelves that extended over two walls. With so many books on St. Kilda to choose from, I looked at all of them and decided what were the best qualities each had to offer. Hirte (also known as Hirta, the main island in the St. Kilda archipelago) had large photographs, maps and drawings of archaeological finds.
St Kilda and the Wider World: Tales of an Iconic Island by Andrew Fleming was published in 2005. It is a large paperback and the only book on the archipelago I bought that contained colour photos. It’s not a photo book, however (I thumbed through and passed on all of those) as the vast majority of its pages were solid text.
The Life and Death of St Kilda by Tom Steel was published in 1975. Don’t let the apparent poor condition of the cover fool you. Despite the book’s age the stains and lines across the cover are all artistic affectations. As a British imprint paperback that means the text is in a minuscule font. Three photo inserts are included.
Island on the Edge of the World: the story of St Kilda by Charles Maclean was published in 1983. I chose it for its photos and low price.
Orkney: A Historical Guide by Caroline Wickham-Jones was purchased at The Orcadian Bookshop in Kirkwall. Other books on Orcadian history seemed too academic (as well as brick-heavy) and this paperback suited me just fine, with chapters on the first settlers, Neolithic Orkney, Bronze Age Orkney, Iron Age Orkney, Pictish Orkney, the Norse in Orkney, the transfer to Scotland, and Orkney since the eighteenth century.
A Leakey’s find, It’s a long way to Muckle Flugga: Journeys in Northern Scotland by W. R. Mitchell was irresistible in its coverage of some pretty remote Scottish locations, including a few pages on the title islet of Shetland.
Unst: My island home and its story by Charles Sandison was published in 1968 and is a history of the northernmost inhabited island in the Shetlands, going back to the earliest inhabitants and the Norse occupation. The author included personal reminiscences of life on Unst in the early 1900’s. This was the last book I bought in Scotland, as it was second-hand from McNaughtan’s bookshop in Edinburgh, which was conveniently located only a few steps from our hostel.
The Picts: A History by Tim Clarkson covered this ancient people who lived in northern Scotland who by the ninth century had assimilated with the Gaelic Scots. Thus their unique identity, culture and mysterious language were lost.
While exploring the travel books at Leakey’s I came across The Stewart Islanders by Olga Sansom, published in 1970. My jaw dropped when I saw a book devoted to the people who inhabit this small island south of South Island, New Zealand. Roughly 450 people live there now yet only 300 at the time of the book’s publication. The author herself is a Stewart Islander and there is even an Orkney connection: in Sansom’s biography on the inside rear flap she reveals that her mother was of half Orkney descent. I could easily have spent hours more in that store exploring the other areas as I didn’t feel I had had enough time to look at all the travel books. I could only glance at the books on Arctic exploration, for example.
I knew that books on the Orcadian idiom of Scots existed, and even photographed some book covers from the archives and open collections in the Kirkwall library. None of them were currently in print, however, so I would have to look in second-hand shops. I was also interested in contemporary Orcadian fiction and was happy to find a few good reads.
Hid kam intae words by Gregor Lamb is a compilation of one hundred Orcadian words, with one word defined per page, some with illustrations. The words are, oddly, not in alphabetical order so I am grateful for the index. This was a lucky find at Leakey’s.
George Mackay Brown was one of Scotland’s most renowned poets, novelists and short story writers and I learned about him while in Orkney. He was born in Stromness and his work is infused with Orcadian myth and history. I cannot resist a good Christmas story so I chose as my first book of Orcadian fiction Brown’s Christmas Stories.
Now this was a title that caught my eye. While I was in Stromness Books and Prints I came across Queer Bashing by Tim Morrison in the section on Orcadian fiction. From the back cover: “‘The first queerbasher McGillivray ever met was in the mirror.’ From the revivalist churches of Orkney in the 1970s, to the gay bars of London and Northern England in the 90s, via the divinity school at Aberdeen, this is the story of McGillivray, a self-centred, promiscuous hypocrite, failed Church of Scotland minister, and his own worst enemy. Determined to live life on his own terms, McGillivray’s grasp on reality slides into psychosis and a sense of his own invulnerability, resulting in a brutal attack ending life as he knows it. Raw and uncompromising, this a viciously funny but ultimately moving account of one man’s desire to come to terms with himself and live his life as he sees fit.”. When I spoke with the shop’s owner, Sheena Winter, about this title, she told me that she knew the author and that the story was partly autobiographical.
I saw many collections of folk tales while in the Orkneys and also in mainland Scotland, yet saw this edition of The Mermaid Bride and other Orkney Folk Tales by Tom Muir only at the Orcadian Bookshop. This is a revised edition from 2023 which stated that it contained additional stories (66 in total) and illustrations, some of which I presume were not in The History Press edition, an example of which is shown below. I saw copies of Orkney Folk Tales in most shops, including the Orcadian Bookshop, and compared them.
Shetland Folk Tales by Lawrence Tulloch was published by The History Press and contains 55 stories.
The last books were those I picked up at the hostel libraries during our stays:
Orkney’s Maritime Heritage by Anne Allen was a short 32-page booklet about Orkney’s connection to the sea, covering its first settlers, the Vikings, merchants and mariners, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finally Orkney’s role in the two World Wars.
Andorra is a diglot in Catalan and English, filled with colour photos and brief text about all the regions in this Pyrenees microstate. Small maps of Andorra la Vella and Les Escaldes were included. The end of the book showed maps of the ski resorts and their various downhill ski runs. It is the first book I own about this country.
Six titles captured my eye which I did not buy. I only recorded their titles and authors. While still in Scotland I visited publisher websites and on-line book retailers to see what the costs of ordering them would be. I ordered all six, plus two more that I found on the Edinburgh University Press website. I will write one single blog report on these eight late arrivals when they all come in. I did this ordering during my first night in Glasgow, and since I had spent so much money I decided that I would not look around any of Glasgow’s second-hand bookshops the following day. Even a bibliophile has to put on the brakes and my book-buying trek in Scotland was now over.
I photographed many book covers at the Kirkwall and Inverness libraries, mostly on the islands of St. Kilda and the Gaelic and Orcadian languages. I was most captivated by this one from the Inverness reference collection:
The graph above shows the drastic decline in the number of unilingual Gaelic speakers in Scotland since 1841 (or 1891). By 1961 there were only 974 people in Scotland who could speak only Gaelic. Unfortunately the hole punching for the ring binding may have cannibalized the figure for 1971. In any case, it is certain that all speakers of Gaelic in Scotland today are also bilingual in English, although I can imagine that there are some children born even today whose first language is in fact Gaelic. The census years at the bottom of the graph start at 1841, yet the underlined title of the graph states that the date range is from 1891-1971. I am inclined to believe that the census years start at 1891 since they increase in decade increments. Three of the four books I bought from Edinburgh University Press were about Gaelic in contemporary Scotland and language revitalization.