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                      T H E   M A N U S C R I P T S
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                  O F   S C O T T I S H   A U T H O R S
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                      National Library of Scotland

The role of a national library to preserve the literature of a nation in
all its forms applies as much to manuscripts as to printed books, and as
much to recent writing as to earlier literary traditions from which current
literature has developed.  Ever since the National Library of Scotland was
founded in 1925 - a time when writers of Stevenson's generation could be
considered as modern Scottish authors - the Library has been collecting
literary manuscripts, working papers, and correspondence of writers still
living or recently dead.  This was done sporadically at first, but from the
mid-1950s and particularly in the last two decades a systematic effort has
been made to gather in a large and representative selection of the archives
of Scottish writers. Gifts, deposits, and purchases have ensured that the
National Library of Scotland now holds, as is appropriate, the outstanding
collection of modern Scottish literary papers.  It is constantly seeking
to add to them, and also to its manuscript holdings relating to artists,
musicians, and to men and women prominent in Scottish public life, so that
our contemporaries and near contemporaries will be properly represented for
posterity in the collections of the nation.

The Department of Manuscripts has not confined its search to authors'
working drafts of literary work, important though these are in the textual
and intellectual study of literature in the making, as represented, say,
by the drafts and notebooks of Edwin Muir, Sydney Goodsir Smith, William
Soutar, and many others. It has attempted rather to build up a more
widely-based collection, including correspondence and personal papers as
well as literary manuscripts.  The relative smallness of the group of
writers who stimulated and developed the Scottish literary renaissance
makes the acquisition of their often interlocking correspondences
particularly valuable.  With this in mind, the Library has acquired
wide-ranging archival groups, in some cases all that is known to have
survived, of manuscript material relating to writers such as AJ Cronin, G
S Fraser, Robert Garioch, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil Gunn, George Campbell
Hay, Robert Kemp,James Kennaway, Eric Linklater, Fionn Mac Colla, Hugh
MacDiarmid, Robert McLellan, Alexander Reid, Alexander Scott, Sydney
Goodsir Smith, William Soutar, Ruthven Todd, Sydney Tremayne, and Douglas
Young. Space forbids any mention here of the special qualities of each of
these groups, such as the literary range of Gunn's and MacDiarmid's papers
or the documentation of an entire career available in Douglas Young's
archive; but each contains both literary work and correspondence.  Writers
represented even more by correspondence than by literary texts include
James Bridie, Compton Mackenzie, and Naomi Mitchison, while the extensive
collection of Hugh MacDiarmid's manuscripts is complemented by several
series of his letters to various correspondents, dated from 1911 to 1978.

Inevitably, many of the papers which have come to the Library are those of
deceased authors.  On the other hand its acquisition policy has for long
embraced authors currently at work; and many contemporary writers are now
represented in the National Library some (including George Mackay Brown,
George Bruce, Gavin Ewart, Duncan Glen, Alasdair Gray, Maurice Lindsay,
Nigel Tranter, and Kenneth White) by substantial collections.  The
Library's continuing aim is to ensure that its coverage of the contemporary
scene is fully representative of the different varieties of creative
writing.

Complementary to the manuscripts of individual authors are the Library's
holdings of papers relating to literary periodicals (including Akros,
Broadsheet, Cencrastus, Chapman, Edinburgh Review, Lallans, Lines Review,
and Scotia Review) and scripts of plays performed at the Citizens',
Gateway, Perth, Royal Lyceum, and Traverse theatres.

The authors' names mentioned in this leaflet are only a selection from a
much more extensive list; and most of the Library's holdings of modern
literary papers are available for study on application to the Keeper of
Manuscripts. Typescript inventories and indexes have been compiled and an
interim checklist of the Library's collection acquired up to 1979 was
published in that year as a special number of The Bibliotheck (vol. 9, no.
4).

Printed in Scotland for H.M.S.O. Dd.8176868 C20 5/91 37097
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