Edinburgh Central Lending Library / Aurora Books

Over the holidays I visited the Central Lending Library with the intention of lending some books out in aide of research for this project, and discovered the Library itself to be a worthy research tool. The building has various floors consisting of different categories, like the Fine Art library, and the Scottish and Edinburgh Libraries. The vast collection of books is divided up by code, a process that must've been incredibly complicated in order for the books to be accessible by the network on the computers, and for people lending from the library to be able to engage with and use in order to easily access what books they want.

What interested me in this respect was the comparison to a tiny second hand bookstore in the Cannonmills area of Edinburgh. It's not like this would generally be a place where people would go to hunt down a particular book, and always struck me as somewhere to have a kind of root around, like you would in say, a large vintage clothing store. I spoke to the owner briefly about his collection, and although he had categorized much of the books historically, the concept of narrative in a collection didn't seem to strike him as important. The shops been there since I can remember in quite an expensive area of the city, so it must be doing alright. This would probably be attributed to the owners' skills as a book collector, knowing when and what to buy and sell, and having a keen eye for collectable items or books of value. What's quite interesting is the fact that such a small store has its own online inventory, I guess even second hand book store owners have to move with the times.