From St Marnock: the Ayrshire Monthly Magazine, December 1898 -
Heritage Services at the Burns Monument Centre will close on Saturday 22nd December at 2 pm. We’ll re-open on Thursday 3rd January 2013.
Registration Services will be open from 9 am until 1 pm on 24th, 27th, 28th and 31st December.
More discoveries from our collections! We now have a much more comprehensive list of the periodicals printed in Kilmarnock in the 1800s, thanks to an astonishing recent find. Boxes containing books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters and single sheets, printed mainly in Kilmarnock in the 19th century, were (re)discovered recently.
Among the periodicals was The Improvisator: an Ayrshire Journal of Literature and the Fine Arts, printed in 1833 by William Hutchison in King Street, Kilmarnock.
Other items added to the collection include James McKie’s The Ayrshire Inspirer (1839) and J. R. Robertson’s The Popular Instructor (1839).
Lots of the pamphlets and posters are of a political nature, satirising or promoting candidates for local or general elections. Some of the periodicals are overtly political, for example The Watchman (1879 – 1880). Another, much earlier periodical highlights the area’s involvement in the Chartist movement - The Ayrshire Democrat; or The Advocate of the People’s Rights (1839).
The more complete list can be found on the Kilmarnock Periodicals page, under Collections.
This excellent little guide was printed in 1893 by D. Brown & Co. of King Street, Kilmarnock. It is a wonderful snapshot of the area c1890s, including its advertisements for the likes of the George Hotel and Ossington Coffee Tavern (“Ossington Reading Room – Strangers, One Penny Per Visit”).
It serves as a tourist guide, rejoicing in the town’s literary heritage while celebrating it’s contemporary achievements in industry and trade. It ends with the bold and confident statement that “Kilmarnock is the most convenient centre for pilgrims to the Land of Burns who wish to get over the ground in an expeditious and systematic manner.”
This and further digitised pamphlets etc will be added to the Collections pages of this site.
Kilmarnock Periodicals (1815 – 1900) is one of the Burns Monument Centre’s Special Collections. This is an almost complete collection of the periodicals printed in Kilmarnock from 1816 to 1900 (it also includes The Ayrshire Magazine and West Country Monthly Repository, which was printed in Irvine in 1815).
The early periodicals in particular provide an interesting view of the town’s literary scene at the time. Most of them contain original poems, stories, essays and reviews by writers with some connection to the area. For example, the Kilmarnock Annual and Western Literary Album (1835) contains two songs by John Galt.
Some of the main printers of the town ventured into periodical printing at some stage. For example, H. Crawford (who was the town’s next printer after John Wilson left for Ayr), printed The Ayrshire Miscellany from 1817. A little later, James McKie printed a few titles including The Ayrshire Inspirer (1839). D. Brown and Company, who printed lots of Burns books from the 1880s until the 1900s, produced the Burns-inspired Auld Killie (1893 – 1898).
Robert Burns figures strongly in these periodicals, either as inspiration, or subject. The Kilmarnock Mirror and Literary Gleaner (1818-1819) contains a print of a letter from Burns to his uncle, Samuel Brown, in 1788. This letter has been of great interest to Burns academics and biographers as it refers to his relationship with Jean Armour, the birth of their twins, and the subsequent marriage and leasing of the farm at Ellisland. The source of the original letter is a case of debate, as Patrick Scott of the University of South Carolina explains in a recent piece in Studies in Scottish Literature.
The Kilmarnock Periodicals collection, including images of title pages or covers, is on the new Collections pages of this site.
For some more exciting discoveries, see Discoveries in our Kilmarnock periodicals 2.