Manuscripta juridica

[Principal Investigator: G. R. Dolezalek]






LOCATION = Edinburgh, Signet L


Edinburgh, Signet L = The Signet Library (Society of Writers to the Signet), Parliament Square, Edinburgh EH1 1RF, Scotland, United Kingdom*

  • Catalogue of the printed books in the library of the Society of Writers to H.M. Signet in Scotland. Part first A-L, Edinburgh 1871. Part second M-Z, Edinburgh 1882 [with List of MSS on pag. 1291-1292. The last supplement to this catalogue was printed in 1936, and it covered acquisitions of 1935].
  • Authors' catalogue in book-form, with a Catalogue of MSS appended to letter Z. Several volumes 462 x 315 mm, produced in the years 1939-1945 from clippings taken from the printed catalogue 1871-1882 and its printed supplements (see below). The clippings were glued onto paper sheets which then became the present catalogue. The glued-on clippings are arranged in two columns per page. They leave much space to the left and to the right. In this space, shelfmarks were entered, in pencil. The free space was furthermore used for additional entries.

    The appended Catalogue of MSS consists of eight columns of clippings, again taken from the printed catalogue. Handwritten shelfmarks have been added to most of these items. Shelf marks in digits correspond to the ones written on the inside of the front cover of the extant manuscripts, in blue pencil. Other shelfmarks, in contrast, are more complex. They consist of digits, and a letter, and again digits or some letter. The librarian in 2006, Mrs Audrey Walker, kindly explained to me that these are old shelfmarks, no longer valid, yet there exists a list of concordances, leading from the old shelfmarks to the current shelfmarks.

  • “Manuscripts (held in safe)”. Three typewritten sheets of paper, listing 26 items from years 1621-1912, but the list comprises no legal literature
  • Uncatalogued Manuscripts: a few items (provenance unknown) are shelved with the law MSS in Cellar 6, window wall, and a few in the Annex off Malcolm Room.