Happy Burns Night
At the beginning of this year we read a fascinating article in the Daily Telegraph about how a collector saved a rare Robert Burns book after spotting a barber using it to clean razors. We were relieved to read that this didn't happen 'the other day' but some time in the 1880s.
The book was rescued by John Murison, a 19th century collector of Robert Burns memorabilia, who spotted the first edition of Poems Chiefly In The Scottish Dialect lying in a decrepit state in an unnamed barber shop he happened to walk past, somewhere in Shrewsbury. The barber had already ripped out approximately fifty pages before Murison stopped him from tearing out more pages of one of the poet’s rarest works when he offered to buy it from him. Only 612 copies of Burns's debut collection, commonly known as the Kilmarnock Edition, were printed in 1786 and the entire print-run sold out within a month - only eighty-four are known to have survived worldwide. It cost three shillings at the time of publishing and besides satire, the Kilmarnock volume contains a number of poems such as "Halloween" (written in 1785), "The Twa Dogs" and "The Cotter's Saturday Night", which are vividly descriptive of the Scots peasant life with which Burns was most familiar; and a group such as "Puir Mailie" and "To a Mouse", which, in the tenderness of their treatment of animals, revealed one of the most attractive sides of Burns' personality.
John Murison was a Glaswegian seed merchant, who collected Burns-related material. Born in 1852, he settled in London where his business responsibilities involved a great deal of travel between England and Scotland. It was his friendship with Craibe Angus, the most notable Burns collector of his time, which inspired Murison to create a private library devoted to books by and about Robert Burns and collecting Burns books and memorabilia became Murison’s obsession for the next forty years.
Mr Murison's treasure trove of 1,700 artefacts is considered one of the world's finest collections of the famous Scottish bard and towards the end of his life he began to consider the library’s future as was keen to avoid the dispersal of a collection which had taken so long to build. While he was reluctantly preparing to put his books up for sale, a decision was taken to find a home for the collection in Dunfermline. It was bought by construction mogul Sir Alexander Gibb, who gifted it to Dunfermline Carnegie Library in 1921. When 'The Murison Burns Collection' was presented to the library it was considered to be one of the finest of its kind in existence.
The Murison Kilmarnock Edition last went on display prior to the first lockdown in 2020, as part of the Tae A Bard exhibition at the library and galleries. Because of its fragile condition, the book is housed in a conservation box paid for by the Dunfermline United Burns Club and it is cared for by OnFife. The incomplete book will be displayed on Burns Night (25th January) until 5th February at Dunfermline Carnegie Library & Galleries in Fife, next to the Abbey Church which Burns visited in 1787.
In the recent Daily Telegraph article Sara Kelly, a local studies officer with OnFife, the cultural charity which runs the library,was quoted as saying it was still a mystery how the book found its way to Shropshire. She said: "The only noted owner is an Alexander Dick in 1790, so there's more research to be done if we are to chart the book's journey to Shrewsbury. "It's wonderful that John Murison had the presence of mind to step in and save the book, given that so few of them still exist. "It doesn't go on show very often because of its condition and rarity."