Acknowledgements
This bibliographical work arose out of the literary and biographical research undertaken for A Dundee Physician in the Republic of Letters: The Life, Letters, and Poems of Peter Goldman (1587/8â1628), published by Boydell for the St Andrews Studies in Scottish History series in 2024. The acknowledgments I made in that work perforce stand here too. Some I must reaffirm and enhance. This specific study kindled when Erin Farley, Library and Information Officer of the Local History Centre in the Dundee Central Library, very kindly sent me, in one of the COVID lockdowns, snaps from her phone of the catalogue here edited. I was electrified that I had before me an entire lost library of such obvious significance. Resolving to bring the lost Dundee âbibliotheckâ, one of the earliest municipal libraries in Scotland and possibly the earliest Scottish lending library, back into modern consciousness, I at once petitioned the help of Daryl Green, Associate Director of Heritage Collections and Co-Director of the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh. Daryl rephotographed the catalogue, and also engaged Nelli Pekurinen for some initial transcription work. In the event, I took on the whole project, but I am once again grateful to Daryl for his gusto for and encouragement of this kind of research. Such terms at once evoke our colleague and friend Kelsey Jackson Williams of Stirling University, of polymathic interests, who when regaled by me with my latest discoveries from afar was wont to return with a sympathetic smile his own prior and closer researches in the field. I hail from just over ten miles from the locale of this study, but live well over four hundred away, and I am most grateful to Daryl and Kelsey for maintaining a modern republic of letters. Other debts within that republic I owe to Alexandra Plane, Curator of Rare Books at the Bodleian Library, and the expert on the lives and librarianship of Peter and Patrick Young. Peter Toth, Curator of Greek Collections at the Bodleian Library, decoded Young Seniorâs chirograph for me. I also gladly thank my Bibliographical Society comrade David Pearson for his help with bindings. Welcome advice on what a âcatechistâ might be in 1670s Dundee came from Chris Langley of the Open University.
In St Andrews, Andrew Pettegree very kindly took this book for this series, and I am indebted to him and his colleague Arthur der Weduwen for doing so with lightning speed. Particular assistance then came from their co-labourer on the USTC, Mhairi Winfield, one of the only serious modern students of the Dundee Bibliotheck, and I am very grateful to her for sharing with me a valuable 1676 council minute she discovered concerning the library and its requirement to lend by âticketâ. Finally, I once again must thank Jamie Reid-Baxter, Honorary Research Fellow in Scottish History at Glasgow University, for putting at my disposal his muckle heid. As I sat almost alone in the reading room in the heights of the National Library of Scotland at ten minutes to closing time on New Yearâs Eve of 2024, examining what I thought was the sole extant copy of James Andersonâs poetic Winter Nicht, ever so pleased with myself for dating the poem, but really quite desperate to get to the pub to see one of my St Andrews schoolmates for the first time in years, little did I know that Anderson and his winter nichts had all been sorted out long ago by Jamie, differently, in print. But he made straight the ways on that for me, as also the ways of many other issues of the most precise nature. I am most grateful to you all.
New College, Oxford
September 2025