Scotland hits the literary jackpot
The John Murray archive was secured for Scotland yesterday, though it came with a £31.2 million price tag. The National Library of Scotland won a £17.7 million lottery grant, the biggest ever awarded in Scotland, to help buy the unique collection of original letters and manuscripts by Lord Byron, David Livingstone, Jane Austen and many others… Over 150 years from 1768, the John Murray publishing house, founded in London by a Scottish family, amassed 150,000 original manuscripts, letters and documents by writers and explorers from Sir Walter Scott to Charles Darwin.