All libraries will close at their usual time on Saturday 24 December 2022 and reopen on Wednesday 28 December 2022.
All libraries will close at their usual time on Saturday 31 December 2022 for Hogmanay and reopen on Wednesday 4 January 2023.
Don’t forget, you can download ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and newspapers throughout the holidays from Your Library.
Very best wishes to all for a lovely festive season.
For our December cabinet display outside the Art & Design Library we’re displaying some wintry pictures and this is a blog post to go alongside it – to add a wintry commentary of sorts. Specifically, I thought I’d think about snow in art.
It’s snowing as I write this.
A cold wet snow, that’s falling in big lumps. We’re all chills and fevers in our flat; coughs are racking like boots against the (cold) floorboards. We have clammy skin, drippy noses, we’ve had too much tea, too much toast and soup. There is too little light, and condensation is rolling off the window-panes. It’s winter.
When I think about the Scottish winter and snow, and pieces of art that capture it, I think of Joan Eardley – immediately – of course. This year marks the centenary of her birth, and there have been some wonderful exhibitions across the city; please do have a read of our previous blogpost.
I find her the most beautiful and powerful of painters, for the sheer depth of emotion she conveys. In her painting, Catterline in Winter (1963), a row of cottages slips, like they are being tipped from beneath, off a snowy hillside. Above, unflinching, is a cold grey sky. The night has left its thumbprint in the shape of the moon, and we can feel how it lurks, in a vast forbidding way, all around us. There is a wetness in the snow and a bitterness. The picture is also a portrait of her Catterline home as Joan Eardley lived in one of the cottages, the furthest on the left, number 1 South Row. We can’t reproduce the painting here unfortunately but it’s on display in the left-hand cabinet half-way up the stone staircase to the Reference department.
In art historical terms, Joan Eardley’s work nods towards abstract expressionism, expressionism, romanticism, and en plein-airistes everywhere. But really, as an artist, she is herself, and she paints what it is like to be in the fields, and in front of the sea, in all that landscape and weather that’s happening out there. She moved to Catterline, a small village on the north-east coast from Glasgow. She painted outdoors, weighing down her work with ropes and anchors and stones. She wore oilskins. She got very cold…
As a child my family lived in Germany for a while, and I remember how snow happened properly there, every winter. Or at least in my memory it did. My dad gritted and shovelled the path in front of our house with a fluorescent orange snow shovel, and my parents dressed me in a red snowsuit. Which makes me think about the whiteness of snow – and how light and colour sit in relationship with it.
Claude Monet was a master with regards colour and light on snow. He too dressed for the cold, in English tweeds apparently. I immediately think of his haystacks but he painted many snow-scenes.
He shows so perfectly how snow covers and transforms the forms within a landscape. The haystack is such a strange lump of a shape; we feel how it sits there right from the middle out.
Another snowy treasure – the Limbourg Brothers’ page for February in the late medieval illuminated manuscript, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
It’s part of a book of hours, a book of prayers to be said at canonical hours, made between c. 1412 – 1416, by three brothers, Dutch miniaturists, Herman, Paul and Johan. Cover the blue parts of the painting with your fingers and the snow feels so different – colder maybe? The blue is so strong. And precious. There’s an interesting blog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Limbourg brothers (mostly it looks at their earlier Belles Heures). And another all about the practical questions on drawing and illumination in the middle ages.
Another painting I wanted to mention was the German painter and printmaker, Franz Marc’s picture of a white dog lying down in the snow.
The dog was Franz Marc’s own dog, Russi. He paints him (or her?) in non-naturalistic colour; colour-wheel colours, that are pure and un-patterned – the brushwork is less busy than a Vuillard or a Bonnard. And the shapes are very soft and simple. The dog and the snowy ground it lies on are gently modelled and fit together like an interlocking wooden toy. The living creature and its environment are one, and neither seem to threaten.
Franz Marc was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter group, an art movement important to expressionism. There was no manifesto to the group, and although the work looked in many directions, it shared a commonality in its desire to express spirituality through art. The Blaue Reiter artists were interested in the relationships between art and music and colour; in medieval art and primitivism, children’s art and folk art. And they had a special interest in how colour might convey spirituality and be imbued with symbolic associations. Franz Marc painted many animals. I find them very dignified and beautiful. The poet Mary Oliver, titled a collection of poems, Blue Horses (2014), after Franz Marc’s paintings –
I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us…
To be outside in the snow, and then suddenly inside, in the warm, looking out at the snow… This is a feeling we all feel. We feel contentment and comfort coming indoors after being outside and I associate these feelings very much with memories of winter and childhood.
Jill Barklem’s Winter Story has always sat in my head. It’s part of her Brambly Hedge series, published in 1980, about a community of mice – Mr and Mrs Toadflax and their family and friends.
The details, the observation, the miniaturised world… each page is exquisite. She even made working mechanical models for the world that she drew; a mouse mill and a dairy. I think of Shirley Hughes too, and how she manages to capture the glow of windows and doorways and inside spaces, while outside, sits the winter cold. That glowing warmth isn’t budging, there’s no way the cold can get in.
Tove Jansson’s character, the Groke, is a hilly-shaped mound of a creature, that appears in many of her Moomin stories. She’s always seeking out warmth, but anything she touches turns to ice or snow or dies. And then of course there’s Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman for childhood snow at its most magical.
I remember listening a few years ago to a podcast on architectural design, specifically air conditioning in fact. The podcast talked a little about the pleasure we feel in moving from one temperature to another – about the cosy inside space, and the cool summer breeze. And design thoughts on creating a thermally fluctuating space to mimic this pleasure; on ideas about how we perceive temperature, and can we see temperature as more of a sense? Do we need to move away from thermally neutral spaces and recalibrate how we cope with, and sense, our thermal environment? You can listen to the 99% invisible podcast here.
And a few extra thoughts.
On snow, and joy, I’d just like to include Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. It works for me every time.
On beautiful book jackets – Tove Jansson’s Moominland Midwinter.
On frost fairs and the little ice age – the opening scenes in the film Orlando directed by Sally Potter. The young Orlando is a page in the Elizabethan court and falls in love with Sasha, a princess in the Russian entourage, as they skate through one of the Thames’ frost fairs.
Also a London Review of Books article on frost fairs by the poet John Burnside.
On ice skating and painting – Hendrick Avercamp!
On snow flurries – Alexander Calder and explore more on Calder by borrowing a book.
On any snowy painting by Pieter Breughel the Elder.
And lastly, any snowy woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige.
Books on all the artists mentioned are available to borrow from the Art & Design Library, Central Library. Please come and browse or search the Library catalogue online to reserve and pick up from a library of your choice.
Christmas can bring out something sentimental in authors and readers alike, something locked away for the rest of the year, like Bukowski’s Bluebird. This means that Christmas stories are a genre of their own, sentimental but sad and happy, stories which hold a mirror up to their characters at a magical, vulnerable, quivering time of the year, when the air between worlds seems thinner than ever.
Here, Hope from Central Library, highlights four excellent Christmas stories.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
“Marley was dead; to begin with.“
But this doesn’t stop Marley coming back, the first of four ghosts to visit his old business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge. A classic known by children and adults alike, living on thanks to adaptions such as A Muppet’s Christmas Carol. I remember playing Tiny Tim’s mother in an assembly when I was seven years old (I think my costume was a pinny over my school uniform.)
This story of cruelty and redemption, of second chances, of warmth, love and conviviality, was written in Victorian England, but still speaks to us today. I think of it smelling of port and mincemeat, with the clutter of cutlery in the background, and the glow of a warm coal fire, flickering by the hearth. It’s a book to make you feel warm, even when winter is at its coldest, and maybe, that is why we still need it.
Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor by John Cheever
“Do you have any children Charlie?” Mrs Fuller asked.
“Four living,” he said, “two in the grave.” The majesty of his lie overwhelmed him.
This strange, sad, lovely story by John Cheever, published in The New Yorker in December 1949, is one of my favourites. A lonesome elevator operator in a high-rise building in New York, encounters everyone who lives in the building and has many drinks and Christmas dinners, throughout the day. Cynical and sentimental, this story looks at giving and the way that while Charlie sees Christmas as a sad season for the poor, perhaps this is not always the case?
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
“Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present.“
I hate this story by O. Henry, but couldn’t not include it. The first time I read it I wept at the stupid injustice at the heart of the tale, where an artist and his lovely wife both sell their most prized possessions to buy one another a Christmas gift. It’s desperately sad, but it is about love, and beautifully written. And I remember it, even if it is with sadness and anger at this cruel, if sentimental Christmas tale.
Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story by Paul Auster
“The very phrase “Christmas story” had unpleasant associations for me, evoking dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush and treacle.“
A writer is tasked with the impossible: to write a non-sentimental Christmas story. He doesn’t know what to write, until chatting to his friend, cigar shop owner, Auggie Wren. It’s not a conventional Christmas story, but I would argue that it has a lot of sentiment, not in a sickly Hallmark kind of way, but in a way which is real, tender and true.
Listen to Paul Auster reading his story online.
It was also made into Smoke, which I think is a fantastic Christmas film.
Libraries will close at 5pm on Friday 24 December for Christmas and reopen on Wednesday 29 December.
Our libraries will then close again at 5pm on Friday 31 December for Hogmanay and reopen on Wednesday 5 January.
Visit the Your Library website for full details about which of our libraries have reopened, services available, opening hours and which services require an advance booking.
And don’t forget, you can download ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and newspapers throughout the holidays from Your Library online.
Very best wishes to everyone for the festive season!
The Christmas and New Year opening hours for our reopened libraries will be:
Friday 25 December – all libraries closed
Saturday 26 December – all libraries closed
Monday 28 December – all libraries closed
Tuesday 29 December – open with revised hours (due to Covid-19)
Wednesday 30 December – open with revised hours (due to Covid-9)
Thursday 31 December – Fountainbridge, Gilmerton, Kirkliston and Stockbridge Libraries will be closed. The other reopened libraries will be open with revised hours (due to Covid-19)
Friday 1 January – all libraries closed
Saturday 2 January – all libraries closed
Monday 4 January – all libraries closed
Tuesday 5 January onwards – open with revised hours (due to Covid-19)
Don’t forget to book your time slot before you visit.
There are currently ten reopened libraries: Central Library (Children’s and Lending Libraries), Craigmillar, Drumbrae, Fountainbridge, Gilmerton, Kirkliston, McDonald Road, Newington, Stockbridge and Wester Hailes. .
Full information about visiting one of our reopened libraries can be found in our Library reopening information and FAQs.
Remember you can download ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and newspapers throughout the holidays from Your Library online.
Happy Christmas everyone!
Did Santa give you a lovely techie present for xmas? Well, if you did receive a new tablet or phone for Christmas, you can give yourself a further gift of free ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and newspapers!
Your Edinburgh Libraries membership card allows you to access an amazing range of downloadable services that will save you money and enhance your free time.
eBooks
Add the Libby app from OverDrive to your new device for the easiest access to thousands of quality, free ebooks for the whole family.
Audiobooks
Don’t sign up for expensive audiobook services – use our free ones instead! We have four brilliant apps giving you access to thousands of bestselling audiobooks.
Magazines
You’ll find it hard to leave your armchair after you discover our amazing range of downloadable magazines!
Newspapers
Read a huge range of daily newspapers for free with PressReader including Scottish, national and international titles.
You’ll find full instructions on how to get started on our Your Library website. Want a hand getting your device set up for using these services? Then pop in to one of our eBook Drop-in sessions on Tuesdays from 2-3.30pm or the first Thursday of the month from 10.30am-noon on the Mezzanine in the Central Library.
Central Library is delighted to offer the chance to win tickets to see ‘The Worst Witch’ at Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre on Tuesday 7 May 2019. 2 pairs of tickets have been generously donated by Capital Theatres for this family-friendly show based on the book by Jill Murphy. Definitely something to look forward to in 2019!
The performance is suitable for children 7+ so you must be aged between 7 and 11 to enter the competition.
To be in with a chance of winning, complete The Nutcracker Christmas Quiz at Central Library. Pick up your quiz sheet from the Children’s or Music Library and remember to hand back your completed sheet before your leave the library. All the answers can be found in The Nutcracker display which is on view on the Mezzanine level at Central Library.
The competition runs until 31 December. Remember to include parent/carer contact details so that the lucky winner can be contacted on 11 January 2019.
Good luck!
Christmas has come early this year! We’re delighted to have the support of The Royal Lyceum Theatre who have very kindly provided a prize for a Children’s Library art competition.
Enter a drawing or painting on the theme of ‘Peter Pan’ for a chance to win a family ticket (2 adults and 2 children) to a performance of The Lyceum’s eagerly anticipated Christmas show, ‘Wendy and Peter Pan’. The ticket is available on either 1st, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 12th or 13th December 2018. The competition is open to anyone aged 5-11 years.
Here’s how to enter:
1. Draw or paint on an A4 sheet of paper a picture relating to ‘Peter Pan’.
2. Write your name and age on the back
3. Ask your parent/carer to put their email address or phone number on the back also.
4. Hand in your artwork to the Central Children’s Library, 7. George IV Bridge, EH1 1EG
5. Please note, the library will not be able to return your artwork
6. The closing date is Saturday 24 November 2018
7. The winner will be notified on Tuesday 28 November 2018. Prize to be collected from Central Library
Good luck!
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my library gave to me:
The daily paper
Loads of Bookbug sessions
Jazz music streaming
Digital drop-ins
A place for study
Online image archives
A funding website
Free ebooks!
eMagazines
Homework help
Audiobooks
and a really handy library app!
Central Library has a new display entitled ‘Dickens and the Victorian Christmas’. Here’s a taster of the exhibition which you can visit until the end of December.
It’s hard to imagine, but at the beginning of the 19th century, Christmas was hardly celebrated. Many shops and businesses did not even consider it a holiday.
It was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who popularised most of the aspects of Christmas we recognise today. In 1848, The Illustrated London News published a drawing of the royal family celebrating round a decorated Christmas tree, a tradition carried on from Prince Albert’s childhood in Germany. Soon, many homes in Britain had a tree bedecked with candles, homemade decorations and small gifts.
A very merry Christmas, c1900
The first Christmas card appeared in 1843 with an illustration showing a group of people round a dinner table and a Christmas message. By the 1880s sending Christmas cards had become hugely popular. 11.5 million cards were produced in 1880 alone!
Crackers first appeared in 1848 when a British confectioner, Tom Smith, invented a bold new way to sell sweets. Inspired by a trip to Paris where he saw bon bons – sugar almonds wrapped in twists of paper – Smith created a simple package filled with sweets that snapped when pulled apart. The sweets were replaced by small gifts and paper hats in the late Victorian period.
Christmas for the Victorians was a festival for the family and a time to gather in the best room in the house and play parlour games. Some, such as Blind man’s Buff, Charades and Twenty Questions, are still played today.
The Young Folks by Randolph Caldecott
The custom of decking the walls and windows with sprigs and twigs took on a more elaborate affair with homemade paper decorations and colourful paper chains appearing in homes.
While Charles Dickens did not invent the Victorian Christmas, his book ‘A Christmas Carol’ is credited with helping to popularise the traditions of the festival. Its themes of family, charity, goodwill, and happiness encapsulate the spirit of the Victorian Christmas and remain central to the Christmas we celebrate.
Between 1843 and 1848, Dickens published five Christmas novellas, one of which was to become one of the most oft filmed, staged, read, sung, repeated, copied, adapted Christmas stories. ‘A Christmas Carol’ was written in October to November and published in December of 1843. By January of 1844 it was on its third edition. In February, the first theatrical production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ took place with a further eight productions appearing in quick succession. In the years that followed Dickens published ‘The Chimes’ in 1844, ‘The Cricket on the Hearth’ in 1845, ‘The Battle of Life’ in 1846 and after a break of a year which he is said to have regretted, ‘The Haunted Man and the Ghost Bargain’ in 1848.
As well as being a prodigious talent, Dickens was a canny businessman and for all the later Christmas novellas, the theatrical production opened on the same day as the book publication.
Dickens was the owner and editor of two literary magazines, ‘Household Words’ and then ‘All the Year Round’, where serialisations of his stories appeared along with contributions by other writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. In both magazines, Dickens regularly wrote Christmas stories and special Christmas issues were produced.
There are many Christmas tales in the Library by Dickens and others, why not borrow one today?
With thanks to our colleagues in Museums and Galleries Edinburgh and Information and Learning Resources for lending us the many curios included in the display.
Libraries’ opening hours over the festive period:
Saturday 23 December – normal hours
Monday 25 December – closed
Tuesday 26 December – closed
Wednesday 27 December – normal hours
Thursday 28 December – normal hours
Friday 29 December – normal hours
Saturday 30 December – normal hours
Monday 1 January – closed
Tuesday 2 January – closed
Wednesday 3 January onwards – normal hours
Don’t forget, you can download free ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and newspapers from Your Library throughout the holidays.
With very best wishes for the season from Edinburgh Libraries.
We’re still in the Christmas mood and have been flicking through the pages of the British Newspaper Archive, delving into Christmases past.
1918’s panto at the King’s Theatre was Jack and The Beanstalk… Oh yes it was!
5th January 1918
In 1900 there was a “Great Christmas and New Year Carnival” in the Waverley Market, which had been turned into “a veritable Fairyland” and not a big wheel or German Market in sight!
25th December 1924
In 1920 the coolest Christmas gift was a gramophone…..fast forward 96 years, and once again it’s appearing on Santa’s list.
24th December 1920
With Christmas Day only becoming a public holiday in Scotland in 1958, most workers were lucky to get a half days holiday to celebrate….
22nd December 1924
All these ads were taken from the Edinburgh Evening News, but there are over 14 million digitised pages from more than 700 UK and Irish newspapers available on the British Newspaper Archive. You can browse for FREE in Central Library’s Edinburgh & Scottish Collection and Reference Library.
So do come and have a look yourself and use the Libraries computers to explore thousands of newspapers from 1710-1954 for FREE.
Here are our Libraries’ opening hours over Christmas and New Year:
Saturday 24 December – opening hours as normal
Monday 26 December – closed
Tuesday 27 December – closed
Wednesday 28 December – opening hours as normal
Thursday 29 December – opening hours as normal
Friday 30 December – opening hours as normal
Saturday 31 December – opening hours as normal
Monday 2 January – closed
Tuesday 3 January – closed
Wednesday 4 January onwards – opening hours as normal
For more detailed information visit your local library’s web page and remember, Your Library is always open online.
You can download free ebooks, audiobooks and magazines from Your Library throughout the holidays and keep up with the latest news with free access to Library PressDisplay.
Our friends in Edinburgh Museums and Galleries have added a gorgeous exhibition of childhood memories of winter to Capital Collections.
26 Children’s Winters is an exciting exhibition which captures the intangible memories of childhood – tingling cold hands, rainy day boredom, the excitement of opening presents, the whizz and bang of fireworks – through objects from the Museum of Childhood’s collection, and writings inspired by them by the ‘26’ group of writers.
‘…five I really need a five come on roll!’, from the accompanying sestude by Mandy Lee
For the full evocative experience, you can see the chosen objects alongside the writings on display at the Museum of Childhood until April 10th 2016.
Wester Hailes Library’s ‘Knit & Natter’ group have truly embraced the festive season by producing a fabulous knitted tree, complete with knitted crackers, baubles and Christmas puddings.
The group started work on this masterpiece last year, but have gradually added more woollen ‘leaves’ and decorations, to make it bigger & better than ever!
Wester Hailes ‘Knit & Natter’ meet at the Library on fortnightly Wednesdays, 2-4pm. All knitters & crochet-ers, from beginners to experts, are welcome. You can bring your own project to work on, or join together knitting for charities: the group have contributed to causes including disaster relief, soldiers’ welfare and local emergency midwives.
On alternate weeks, the fun and friendly Games Club (fortnightly Wednesdays, 2-4pm) offers a selection of old and new board-games to enjoy: from traditional dominoes and Scrabble, to modern classics like Taxi & Pass the Bomb! Teas, coffees and biscuits are provided free of charge.
There’s also have a Colouring Group for adults on Wednesday evenings, 6:30-7:30pm. This craze has been gaining international popularity, with colouring-in books climbing up the best-seller lists, and it’s recognised as a relaxing and therapeutic activity. Try your hand at some of the beautiful and intricate designs!
Several Edinburgh Libraries run similar knitting and craft groups for adults. Why not enquire at your local branch, or check their web page.
The wonderful ladies who attend Wester Hailes Library Knitting Group have been working hard again, this time they have produced a magnificent 7ft (!) knitted Christmas tree including decorations.
The group of 15 ladies have been working on the project since the summer and have knitted over 300 green squares all of different shades and styles to give the tree more texture. They then knitted/crafted Christmas Crackers, Candy Canes and Baubles to adorn the tree, not to mention various small trees that have been dotted around the library.
The building of the tree took place in the library this week and after the grand unveiling, the staff and the community are delighted by the results, with almost every person coming in the door stopping dead in their tracks to admire the groups handiwork. The only disappointed people have been the nursery visit from Juniper Green Nursery who wanted to pull the crackers!
The tree will be in the library until the 6th of January so please come along and see it.
Christmas gives theatres the chance to glam up with exotic costumes and colourful sets. For a short period only, we are showcasing these Christmas productions in a series of displays in the Central Library. With the help of the Royal Lyceum and Edinburgh‘s Museums & Galleries’ King’s Theatre collection we highlight the various strands that go into a successful Christmas show. Items from our own theatre archive complete the cast.
Showing in Central Library over the festive season – catch it while you can!
Portobello Library’s Chatterbooks group for younger readers celebrated their last meeting of the year in their unique style. If you are the kind of person who enjoys dressing your pet up in festive attire there’s still time to enter Leith Library’s Festive Furballs competition. Entrants so far include a dead badger and an axolotl. Beat that!
Continue the yuletide pets theme maybe with a viewing of The Christmas Bunny or one of our other seasonal DVD picks.
Get rockin’ around the Christmas tree with the best in festive music from the absolutely enormous selection of Christmas sheet music available from the music library. There are seasonal CDs aplenty as well – everything from indie hero Sufjan Stevens’ 5 disc box set of Christmas songs to Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band’s Carols and Capers – a very up tempo English folk treatment full of boars heads, mummers and sweet mulled wine. Christmas Star by the Cambridge Singers and Orchestra is a fascinating mix of standards and more unusual songs from all over the world, or there are of course always the old favourites.
Alternatively you can of course retreat from it all and escape with the help of a good book. There’s an avalanche of ‘Best of..’ book lists around this time of year so we’re especially grateful to our chums at the Scottish Book trust who put together this very helpful Best of the ‘best of’ lists.
Finally, another reminder of when libraries are closed and open over the next couple of weeks. Merry Christmas everyone!
You know the festive season is well and truly here when Shakespeare gets his Christmas on. Optimistic library staff have hung their stockings by the fireplace but I’m not convinced Santa will find a way to squeeze past the radiator.
We’ve had scrumptious looking gingerbread decorating at Moredun….
And at Leith Library little Robbie got all dressed up for the Christmas Bookbug session. Cute enough for you?
Not long to go now. Libraries will close at 5pm on Christmas Eve and revert to the usual opening hours on the 27th. For new year it’s a 5pm close on Hogmanay then back to normal on Thursday 3rd January. Merry Christmas everyone!
So here is your super-special double-door gift for Christmas Eve!
If you go here, and search for A Christmas Carol, you can download it for free – the perfect ending to our calendar, this Christmas Eve!
So all that’s left is to wish you a very merry Christmas from everyone here at Edinburgh City Libraries. We hope that our advent calendar has brought you a little bit of daily festive cheer!
Libraries are closed for the holidays and will reopen as normal on Wednesday.
Tales of One City 