This volume is both a ‘biography’ and a catalogue of ‘a great Bibliotheck’, as the Scottish antiquary Sir Robert Sibbald called it, of the Lindsays of Balcarres – a library assembled from the 1570s onwards and dispersed in 1792, only to be partially recovered in the modern era. In 1628, when the collection was seeing a phase of considerable expansion by David, 1st Lord Lindsay, his ten-year-old son, Alexander, wrote to his father hopeful that as a reward for his academic achievements, ‘I will get from you when I come to Balcarres a litle kist with some bonie litle bookes’.¹ A young scholar thirsty for knowledge, perhaps even a budding bibliophile hungry for the book as an object, Alexander was not alone among family members in expressing such bookish inclinations. Looking at the centuries-long history of the Lindsays, this relationship with books has been an enduring one and, as Alexander’s endearing wish suggests, it was developed at a young age. While we do not know what ‘litle bookes’ were in the boy’s ‘litle kist’ (chest), we can nevertheless imagine the pleasure they gave him and the delight of a bookish father in receiving such a letter from a studious son.

How a library of books, one by one, came to fill the ‘kists’ and shelves at Balcarres over several generations, how these books were used, not only as tools of improvement in a changing world but perhaps too as modes of pleasurable escape and consolation, how we can better understand the principal players in this story and the tumultuous times in which they lived through a close inspection of their books, these are the primary purposes of this book, a book which itself will find a place in the present-day library at Balcarres.

The Lindsays, Earls of Balcarres from 1651 and Earls of Crawford from 1848, are one of the most ancient aristocratic families of Scotland. Although best known for the immense and ambitious Bibliotheca Lindesiana assembled during the nineteenth century, the family’s earlier and equally important collecting is no less fascinating.² This began with the brothers David Lindsay, Lord Edzell (1551?–1610), and John Lindsay, Lord Menmuir (1552–98), reached its height in the time of Menmuir’s son, David Lindsay, 1st Lord Lindsay of Balcarres (1587–1641). The story continued with Alexander Lindsay, 1st Earl of Balcarres (1618–59) and in the time of his second son, Colin, 3rd Earl of Balcarres (1652–1722), before the eighteenth century brought what apparently was a period of stagnation before the ultimate dispersal in 1792. Despite that dispersal, the present volume recovers and describes 1,762 individual printed items which were part of the library at Balcarres during the early modern period, in doing so providing the first modern catalogue of a nearly forgotten collection.

Such a study lies within and has developed from a new interest in Scottish book history in recent decades, a renaissance evident in the ongoing Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland.³ Its roots lie earlier in the twentieth century, however, with John Durkan and Anthony Ross’s pioneering Early Scottish Libraries (1961) and with the many contributions to book history published in the long-running Transactions, Occasional Publications, and Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society (1896–present) and the Bibliotheck (1956–2004).⁴ Studies of individual early modern libraries have formed an important part of this research agenda and have informed our own approach to the library at Balcarres. Notable examples include R.H. MacDonald’s study of the library of William Drummond of Hawthornden, W.A. Kelly on Lord George Douglas, Christine Gascoigne on William Guild, Robert Betteridge on James Sutherland, Karen Baston on Charles Areskine, and most recently Murray Simpson on James Nairn.⁵

Comparing the Balcarres library with the private libraries named above makes its importance immediately apparent. In its very size – at least the 1,762 items identified here but more likely somewhere between 2,500 and 6,200 volumes in its original form (see Chapter 3) – it dwarfed comparable libraries elsewhere in early seventeenth-century Scotland, with Drummond of Hawthornden’s perhaps coming closest with its 1,402 volumes. It seems likely that the ‘great Bibliotheck’ at Balcarres was one of the largest of its kind in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Scotland, though as the century progressed collections of this size became increasingly common.⁶

It was not merely in quantity that the Balcarres library was remarkable, but also in quality and diversity. When Drummond of Hawthornden wrote to the 1st Lord Lindsay of Balcarres as one book collector to another, lamenting ‘what a difficultie it were to send you a booke which ye (perhaps) had not alreddy, or a new one, ye having so good intelligence abroad’, he was not over-egging the pudding.⁷ As discussed further in this volume, the collection contains books sourced from across the European continent and representing nearly all of the major centres of early book production as well as a host of rarities and unique or near-unique items. It was an important collection not just on a Scottish but on a European scale.

For modern scholars, the value of the library lies first and foremost in the window it offers us onto learned aristocratic culture in early modern Scotland. Older claims of Scotland’s intellectual poverty and lack of a renaissance ring increasingly hollow. The Catalogue presented here offers concrete, quantifiable evidence of a vibrant culture centred on the tower house at Balcarres and radiating in every direction. This culture, no less intellectual than political, religious and social, is in tune with the latest continental developments as well as the activities of scholars, courtiers, clerics, scientists and poets across the British Isles.⁸ The full significance of this collection will only gradually be teased out, but already work such as the study of the library’s alchemical contents by Ignacio-Miguel Pascual-Valderrama and Joaquín Pérez-Pariente suggests the rich narrative it can offer historians of Scotland’s intellectual, cultural, and scientific history.⁹

The reconstruction of the collection is discussed in detail in Chapter 3, but its main sources deserve to be introduced here in their own right. As noted, the library was sold in Edinburgh by auction in 1792, and only a moiety of volumes – eighty-seven in total – have since been recovered by the family. By contrast, the archive of manuscript materials collected by the family have remained remarkably intact. The state papers and early modern political correspondence collected by John Lindsay, Lord Menmuir, rich in material relating to Mary, Queen of Scots, were donated to the Advocates Library by his descendant, Colin, 3rd Earl of Balcarres, in 1712 and are now in the National Library of Scotland (shelfmark Adv. MS.29.2.1–9). The remainder of the family papers were deposited first in the John Rylands Library and subsequently in the National Library of Scotland where they remain available for consultation at shelfmark Acc. 9769.¹⁰ Before being deposited, they were extensively used by Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, 25th Earl of Crawford, in his magisterial Lives of the Lindsays, or, a Memoir of the Houses of Crawford and Balcarres (1858).¹¹ We have not exhaustively retraced Lord Lindsay’s steps here, but have generally relied upon his published account for biographical details, returning only to the archive for book lists and other material immediately relevant to the library. These lists, many of them never transcribed (see Appendix A), and often palaeographically challenging, have been both supplemented and corroborated by the unique copy of the printed catalogue of the 1792 sale, reproduced in Appendix B, the discovery of which is outlined in Chapter 3.

The inspiration for this project and its intellectual core, however, remain the physical volumes which are still preserved at Balcarres. The collection, recovered with a mixture of painful care and good luck by six generations of the family, represents one of the most ambitious attempts to recollect a dispersed library in the British Isles and is here catalogued in full for the first time. We have also undertaken a study of stray Balcarres books that migrated to public collections (not to mention a few private libraries) across the world. These additional physical volumes, numbering a further eighty-six items, like those at now at Balcarres, have offered a vital corrective and addition to the evidence of the manuscript lists in the archive and the 1792 catalogue. Much can be learned from the close scrutiny of the physical copies themselves – evidence of acquisition, including cost and place of purchase, evidence of reading, evidence from the binding and rebinding of volumes. Nevertheless, titles of and publication information about books which are not extant also offer us an essential, if sometime more speculative, route into the minds and times of those Lindsay family members, men and women alike, who would have had access to these volumes.

We begin with three chapters covering the biography, or perhaps ‘biblio-biography’ of the library. Chapter 1, which has been written by Jane Stevenson, with revisions by Kelsey Jackson Williams and William Zachs, locates its origins and traces the first phase of its development during the lives of the brothers Lords Edzell and Menmuir, David Lindsay, 1st Lord Lindsay of Balcarres (arguably the most active collector in the family), and Alexander Lindsay, 1st Earl of Balcarres (of the ‘litle kist of bonie litle bookes’). Chapter 2 continues this history with the story of the library in the time of Alexander’s son, Colin Lindsay, 3rd Earl of Balcarres, tracing his sojourn on the Continent and its significant impact on his collecting practices. Chapter 3 follows this story to its conclusion with the library’s sale, discusses our reconstruction, its methodology and implications, and analyses the contents of the library across axes of price, rarity, place of origin, date, etc. These chapters were written by Kelsey Jackson Williams and revised by William Zachs.

These narrative chapters are followed by the Catalogue itself, a collaborative effort but whose principal compilation and bibliographical detail was undertaken by Kelsey Jackson Williams. Arranged alphabetically, each item has been given a number to facilitate reference and citation. These numbers are referred to throughout the main narrative. For each entry we have given as much bibliographical information as possible, particularly for those books which still survive. Inevitably, there are items which can be identified only tentatively, if at all. For example, given the information ‘Biblia Latina’, 2 toms’, as found in one early seventeenth-century manuscript list, it is clearly not possible to even speculate on the edition without corroborating evidence from the more detailed printed 1792 catalogue. One might happily imagine a two-volume Bible printed in Mainz in the mid 1450s, but there is no good reason to suppose such ‘bonie big bookes’ were to be found at Balcarres – at least not until the nineteenth century.

Appended to the Catalogue is a table of surviving volumes at Balcarres designed to facilitate future use of that collection as well as a detailed index of non-Lindsay provenance which vividly demonstrates the many libraries which fed into the great collection and its many beneficiaries in the wake of the 1792 sale.

The story concludes with two substantial appendices, the first of which presents full transcriptions of and commentaries on the eight manuscript booklists which underpin substantial elements of the Catalogue. Many of these lists are badly damaged and heavily abbreviated to the point of total obscurity, making reproduction in their original form essential for the use of subsequent scholars. This first appendix is principally the work of Kelsey Jackson Williams. His transcription of manuscript material is complemented by the second appendix, which includes a full facsimile reproduction of the unique surviving copy of the 1792 Catalogue which was printed and distributed at the time of the sale in April of that year. That catalogue now resides in the Brian Lawn Collection in the Bodleian Library (shelfmark Lawn d.101 (2)). Again, this reproduction allows others to check our workings and conclusions as well as making an important bibliographical resource accessible for the first time. The principal Catalogue, when relevant, refers to the entry in the printed catalogue (designated ‘C’).

Although almost a decade in the making, this book is only the beginning of any study of this remarkable Lindsay family library. We hope that the guide to its contents provided here will inspire others to continue our work and restore the Balcarres collection to its rightful place as one of the great monuments of the Scottish Renaissance. We also hope that this volume will serve as a clarion call to librarians, collectors, dealers, and auctioneers to be aware of books with Lindsay provenance as they pass through their hands. The illustrations to this volume include no fewer than twenty-three different marks of ownership relating to family members, both ink inscriptions and gilt-stamped armorial supralibros. Even during the writing of this book one volume has been newly recovered and donated to the library (853) and another is currently being offered for sale (486). We would encourage anyone who has such books in their possession to notify the present-day representatives of the family at Balcarres House in Fife or the authors.