Overdue first edition returns to Stornoway library
Alastair McIntosh ordered a second-hand book on eBay recently, he was thrilled to get a first edition with the dust cover still intact for £7.49.
However, he was less impressed to find that the volume had within its covers a Western Isles Libraries stamp. There was no official stamp to say it had been withdrawn.
On enquiring with the library, he found the book was down as long overdue.
He said: ‘I hugely value the library’s collection and the helpfulness of its staff. Like many people, I rely on that oasis of learning in the heart of Stornoway for my research as a writer. I am therefore very glad to be able to see this copy returned.’
The book is called Father Allan’s Island by Amy Murray which Mr McIntosh describes as ‘an elegant and elegiac account of life on the Isle of Eriskay in 1905’.
Its author was a young American musicologist. She had visited the island for a summer and recorded village life as it surrounded Father Allan McDonald, the renowned parish priest.
In 2002, the Gaelic scholar Ronald Black published a bilingual collection, The Poems of Fr Allan McDonald (Mungo Books, Glasgow). Black describes Murray as having been ‘a competent and sensitive transcriber of folk music’.
She is not to be confused with another visitor, Miss Ada Goodrich Freer, who, in 1894-5, had also visited the Hebrides. She milked Father Allan of his stories of the second sight, but failed adequately to attribute them to him.
That debacle, including the original case studies from Father Allan’s notebooks, is documented in a book by John Lorne Campbell and Trevor H Hall called Strange Things: The Story of Fr Allan McDonald, Ada Goodrich Freer, and the Society for Psychical Research’s Enquiry into Highland Second Sight (reprinted by Birlinn, 2006).
Remarking on his chance recovery of Murray’s book, Mr McIntosh pointed out that it had not necessarily been stolen, but added: ‘In school days, the fine for being overdue at Stornoway library was tuppence a day. Were that to be collected now, after so many years, and with interest added, it would give the library staff a happy day.’