Blackie House Library and Museum
Curiosity | Connections | Discovery
Blackie House Library and Museum (BHLM) is a research centre and exhibition space of some 40,000 items. The collections are open to everyone, although currently by appointment only.
Originally the private collection of William Zachs, BHLM is now a registered Scottish charity. Housed in a 17th-century tenement in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town, the collection includes rare books and manuscripts, paintings, prints, sculpture and photography – along with antiquities, decorative objects, textiles, furniture and items from nature. While focusing on what Zachs describes as the ‘very long 18th century’ (1630-1830), the collection ranges from the medieval period to the present day.
Hundreds of people of all ages visit each year – both in person and online. Activities include teaching, scholarship, exhibitions, publications, artistic collaborations, lending, films and interviews, seminars, lectures, performances, tea-drinking and the popular Blackie House ‘Sunday Salons’.
Blackie House is a seventeenth-century building in Edinburgh’s Old Town, a few hundred yards down from the Castle, in Wardrop’s Court. It was named for Professor John Stuart Blackie (1809-95), who with Patrick Geddes renovated the tenement to create student accommodation at the end of the nineteenth century. The space contains a research library, museum and exhibition space – in all, a cabinet of curiosities celebrating human creativity, ingenuity and folly.
The project is the idea of Bill Zachs, an American who arrived in Edinburgh in 1983 at the age of twenty-two to study Scottish literature and history. While the principal book and manuscript holdings focus on the period from 1630 to 1830, the wider collection ranges from pre-history to the present day – from a Celtic head carved in stone to a special copy of Harry Potter, from an autograph of folk songs arranged by Beethoven to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own annotated copy of his first Sherlock Holmes story.
No less a cabinet of ideas, Blackie House reveals the different ways human beings and material culture interact to convey information and tell stories. Through exhibitions, student seminars, group visits, book launches, music, dramatic and other performances, BHLM’s doors are open to all curious and enquiring minds.
William Zachs, Director
A collector and scholar, Bill is the author of The First John Murray and the Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade (1998), Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart, 1743-1786 (1992) and several scholarly and popular articles, reviews and exhibition catalogues. He lectures internationally on such topics as ‘The History and Art of Letter-Writing before, during and after the Digital Age’, ‘The Thousand-Year History of the Illustrated Book – a Story in Ten Volumes’, ‘The Private Library of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’, ‘Authenticity and Duplicity: Investigations into Multiple Copies of Books’, and much more.
Bill is an Honorary Fellow of the universities of Edinburgh and Stirling, and of the National Library of Scotland, a fellow several antiquarian societies, and, among other bookish organisations, a member of the Roxburghe and Grolier clubs. He holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MLIS from the California State University, and an MSc, PhD and Honorary DLitt from the University of Edinburgh.
Our Team
Alan Grieve
BHLM Artistic Instigator
Alan has an ear for language and a predilection for the strange. Like a latter-day bard, he explores through his work the unfamiliar turn of phrase or gem of information. From processing this raw material, he creates drawings, sculptures, installations and public events that teem with life. These pieces often employ humour, which, like the best of stories, can fly pretty close to the wind. They also contain a close reading of place, a love of landscape and a passion for gathering people’s personal histories.
Kelsey Williams
Senior Research Fellow
Kelsey Jackson Williams is Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Stirling, studying the history of the book, mostly in early modernity and often in Scotland. He is currently working on Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s 1836 Scottish Tour Revisited (co-authored with William Zachs), an examination and amplification of one of the seminal moments in nineteenth-century Scottish book history. He also co-authored ‘Some bonie litle bookes’: A History and Catalogue of the Lindsay Library, 1570-1792 with William Zachs. He is also General Editor of the Scottish History Society and Director of the Pathfoot Press at the University of Stirling.
Julie Johnstone
Administrative advisor
Julie Johnstone was previously the Head Librarian at the Scottish Poetry Library. She is an artist, curator and publisher with particular interest in the artists’ books medium.
Murray Simpson
Senior Research Fellow
Murray Simpson’s professional career has been spent in Edinburgh libraries: from 1975 until 1999 he worked in Edinburgh University Library, latterly becoming head of Special Collections and Services there; from 1999 until he retired in 2008 he was at the National Library of Scotland, initially as Director of Special Collections. From 2011 until 2017 Murray was Honorary Libraries Advisor to the National Trust for Scotland; and from 2018 until 2021 he was an Honorary Fellow in the Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh, where he listed uncatalogued manuscript material bequeathed by David Laing (1793-1878). Since 2008 he been a freelance valuer and appraiser.
Since retiring, Murray has published widely, notably in 2020 with Scholarly Book Collecting in Restoration Scotland: the Library of the Revd James Nairn (1629-1678). He has also written articles on such subjects as Adam Smith’s library, David Laing and his collecting activities, and on the libraries at Newhailes and Brodick Castle.
In 2025, he contributed twenty-nine Scottish entries to the Book Owners Online database (https://bookowners.online. The Edinburgh Bibliographical Society has agreed to publish his catalogue of the library of Adam Bothwell (1529-1593), Bishop of Orkney and a prominent Scottish judge and public servant. Most recently, Murray has upgraded and expanded the list of the personal and estate papers of the Scottish landed family of Rose of Kilravock, following the acquisition of the great majority of these by Blackie House Library and Museum.
William M. Voelkle
Visiting Fellow
William M. Voelkle earned a B.A. in mathematics at Binghamton University (1961) before making a dramatic career change to become a Meyer Schapiro and John Plummer student at Columbia University, where he received an M.A. in Fine Arts (1965). He was subsequently hired by the Morgan Library & Museum, first as curator and then department head of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, where he served a record fifty years (1967-2017). He did many publications on the library’s holdings, his books on the Library’s twelfth-century enamelled Stavelot Triptych and the Book of Hours illuminated by Giulio Clovio for Cardinal Alexander Farnese were particularly noteworthy. The last was the most famous Italian Renaissance manuscript. He also discovered the hidden symbolism of the library’s painted ceilings and did an article on the Seven Deadly Sins before turning to the new fifteenth-century iconography of the virtues. The exhibition and catalogue on the Spanish Forger was a landmark, the first exhibition devoted to a forger in a major museum. He has continued to record new examples of his works, which now number over 400. After his retirement he produced an exhibition and catalogue of his own collection of forgeries, Holy Hoaxes, another landmark as the first work devoted to the global forgeries of illuminated manuscripts. But perhaps his most important project, undertaken with the Princeton Index of Medieval Art, was to make some 60,000 iconographically searchable images available on Corsair, the library’s online catalogue.
Gillian Dooley
Visiting Fellow
Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Associate Professor in English Literature at Flinders University in South Australia. She has published several monographs and scholarly editions and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. Her research interest in Jane Austen is longstanding, and she has presented a number of keynotes and public lectures, in person and online, all over the world. In 2023 and 2024 she was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, and at Trinity College Dublin in 2025. Her particular interest is in music and literature, and a major project completed in 2017 was the detailed cataloguing of the digitised music collection of Jane Austen and her family, and her book She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music was published by Manchester University Press in March 2024, with a paperback edition due out in August 2025. As a singer and pianist she often presents programs of music with literary themes. Her first Jane Austen’s Music program took place in Adelaide, South Australia, in 2007 and since then she has performed many concerts from the Austen music collections in Australia, the UK and elsewhere. To celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th birthday in 2025, she will be presenting many programs of her music in various locations in the UK and Australia. Her Jane Austen’s Music website is at https://sites.google.com/site/janeaustensmusic/home
Laura Klein
Visiting Fellow
Laura Klein, M.M., NCTM, is a US-based pianist and researcher of early keyboard music and performance practice. Distinguished for her interpretation of 18th-century keyboard music, Klein performs frequently on pianoforte and harpsichord. She has performed throughout the USA and in Canada, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic. Current faculty at Colorado Christian University and University of Colorado Boulder, she has also served on faculty at Westminster Choir College, Walla Walla University, and the American Boychoir School. Klein is a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Musicology and Performance Practice at the University of Colorado Boulder, where her research centers on the Austen Family Music Books. A pianist and avid Jane Austen enthusiast her whole life, Klein founded The Jane Austen Playlist in 2019, which combines her zeal for 18th-century music and all things Jane. More of her work, including access to recordings and scores, can be found at www.laurakleinpiano.com
Kai Hostetter-Habib
Summer Intern 2025
Kai Hostetter-Habib is a rising fourth year at Princeton University, pursuing a B.A. in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, with minors in Diplomacy and Astrobiology. His academic work often combines history with scientific diplomacy, social justice movements, and/or religion. He has conducted original research for institutions such as the American Institute of Physics and Princeton University, publishing in Physics Today and presenting at national conferences. He also serves as the Co-Editor in Chief for the Princeton Historical Review. At Blackie House this summer, the majority of his time is dedicated to researching and curating an archival collection on Galilean forgeries, for which he will create an interactive, online exhibition. He also helps catalogue rare books and manuscripts and assists with group tours, among other responsibilities.