So this is a fore-edge painting of Leith Walk (mid-to-late 19th century) as seen in a book we acquired last year.

"But what is a fore-edge painting?" We hear you cry. Grab a seat, get comfy and let us tell you... Fore-edge painting is a technique for decorating a book's fore-edge (the edge opposite a book's spine).

Friends, we’re *delighted* to tell you that we’ve secured a rather special manuscript for the nation.

1/12

#FortingallManuscript The manuscript in question is the Chronicle of Fortingall.

2/12

We have launched an online learning resource – Struggles for Liberty: African American Revolutionaries in the Atlantic World. It shares the fight for social justice of African American freedom fighters, some of whom campaigned in 19th century Scotland.

#StrugglesforLiberty Struggles for Liberty takes its name from the phrase ‘struggles in the cause of liberty’, written by Lewis Henry Douglass (eldest son of Frederick Douglass) of his mother Anna’s tireless antislavery and social justice activism.

#StrugglesforLiberty

During lockdown, Library staff have been improving the quality of transcriptions of our collection of 3,000 digitised Scottish Chapbooks using the @wikisource platform.

#NLSdigitised #NLSData Wikisource is an online library of out-of-copyright, digitised books. It’s part of a wider family of free, open knowledge project run by @wikimediauk; @Wikipedia is its more famous sibling.

On #WomeninScience day let's talk about Williamina Fleming (1857-1911).

#WomeninScienceDay Williamina was born in Dundee, the daughter of a carver and gilder with premises in the Nethergate. She left school when she was 14 and became a pupil-teacher.

#WomeninScience

So here’s a little thread about castles. Actually photos of castles. Actually photos of castles from the MacKinnon collection 📸🏰😍

#ScotlandsPhotos @NatGalleriesSco @welovehistory @HistEnvScot @HeritageFundUK @artfund @scotgov (The photo above shows Tantallon Castle in East Lothian c.1860s-1870s, taken by James Valentine, by the way) > en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantallon…

#ScotlandsPhotos

It's #LibrariesWeek and today's focus is on #LibraryWorkers. So here's a wee thread about our staff members who work with digital collections.

#Library5 @librariesweek @CILIPinfo Anette the Curator selects and prepares collection items for digitisation. “We have very rare and unique items… which unless digitised would remain inaccessible.”

nls.uk/about-us/publi…

We want you to take a look at our peepshow.

#Noncreepypeepy It feels a little odd as a library to ask you this.

#Noncreepypeepy

This is a roll.

#FridayFeeling Would you like to see it unrolled?

On #InternationalWomensDay let's talk about Williamina Fleming (1857-1911).

#IWD2019 Williamina was born in Dundee, the daughter of a carver and gilder with premises in the Nethergate. She left school when she was 14 and became a pupil-teacher.

#IWD2019

If you need more reasons to follow us @natlibscot (and explore our collections) we give you this – a little thread of shiny facts about our Library.

#NLSgems First up: our collections. We have more than 30 million physical and digital items in our collections. When you add subscription items that registered readers can view (many of which can be viewed at home), this jumps to over 76 million items.

Which is a lot.

#NLSgems

We're going to tell you why this book is the link between Star Wars and a popular meat extract paste.

#Bookishfactoid Really. This book is called “The Coming Race” (1870) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and it is a novel about a fantastic subterranean world.

#Bookishfactoid

Today we’d like to tell you about fore-edge painting...

#Foreedgery Which is a technique for decorating a book's fore-edge (the edge opposite a book's spine).

#Foreedgery

As it's International Day of Women & Girls in Science we'd like to tell you about Elizabeth Blackwell.

#WomenInScience Elizabeth was born in Aberdeen c. 1707. Her family were wealthy and she received a good education which almost certainly included art, music, and languages.

#WomenInScience

*National Library digitises *entire* first edition of iconic encyclopaedia*
*Looks around nonchalantly*
*Posts link*
*Waits*
*Adds picture of nodding Kingfisher*

digital.nls.uk/encyclopaedia-… …

#Britannica250 #MondayMotivation @Britannica @nlsrarebooks The Encyclopaedia Britannica is considered to be one of the enduring achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment.

#Britannica250