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The building on George IV bridge

The National Library of Scotland is the legal deposit library of Scotland.

It is based in a collection of buildings in Edinburgh city centre. The headquarters is on George IV Bridge, between the Old Town and the university quarter. There is also a more modern building (1980s) in a residential area on the south side of the town centre, on Causewayside. This was built to accommodate some of the specialist collections (e.g., map library, science library) and to provide large-scale extra storage.

The National Library of Scotland holds over 7 million books, thirteen million printed items and over1.6 million maps. The collection includes copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the original manuscript of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, the First Folio of Shakespeare and numerous jounrnals and other publications.

The National Library of Scotland is a relatively recent body, only formally established by Act of Parliament in 1925. Previously, Scotland's national deposit library was the Advocates Library belonging to the Faculty of Advocates. This was opened in 1689 and gained national library status in the 1710 Copyright Act, giving it the legal right to claim a copy of every book published in Great Britain. In the following centuries, the library added books and manuscripts to the collections by purchase as well as legal deposit, creating a national library in all but name.

By the 1920s, the upkeep of such a major collection was too much for a private body, and, with an endowment of £100,000 provided by Sir Alexander Grant of Forres, the library's contents were presented to the nation. The National Library of Scotland was formally constituted by an Act of Parliament in 1925.

Sir Alexander Grant gave a further £100,000 – making his combined donations the equivalent of around £6 million today – for a new Library building to be constructed on George IV Bridge. Government funding was secured which matched Sir Alexander's donation.

Work on the new building was started in 1938, interrupted by the Second World War, and completed in 1956. By the 1970s, room for the ever-expanding collections was running out, and it was obvious that other premises were needed. The Causewayside Building opened in the south-side of Edinburgh in two phases, in 1989 and in 1995, at a total cost of almost £50 million, providing much-needed additional working space and storage facilities.

Since 1999, the Library has been funded by the Scottish Parliament. It remains one of only six legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and is governed by a board of trustees.

• John Murray Archive
• Scottish Publishers Association

• Official website