The Clement Litill Collection, Edinburgh University Library
All images were taken by and belong to Katherine Holderith.
The Clement Litill Collection held in the Center for Research Collections (CRC) at the University of Edinburgh is the foundation collection of the University Library. Clement Litill (b. 1527) originally bequeathed this collection of primarily theological books to the Ministers of Edinburgh upon his death in 1580. Following his death however, his brother William Litill made provisions to have the books given to the Edinburgh Town Council to use in the new university, which William helped found. Clement Litill’s theological books were the first books in the university library and have remained a part of the University of Edinburgh’s Library since 1580.
The Clement Litill collection is so defined by its namesake: his education, interests, and career. The collection is comprised of 243 volumes covering both Catholic and Protestant theology as well as humanist scholarship. For those familiar with Clement Litill and his legal career, law books are noticeably absent from this collection. According to his will, only the theological books were to be made available to the Kirk of Edinburgh. Half of his law books were left to his wife, who subsequently married another lawyer with a substantial library of his own. The collections of these two legal libraries mixed and have been lost. There is no complete record of Clement Litill’s library.
There were originally 276 volumes in the collection according to the bequest charter drawn up around 1580; 243 of these still remain in the CRC. A significant portion of the collection is made up of early printed books from the sixteenth century, though Litill acquired some incunabula through secondary sources such as booksellers and dealers following the Reformation in Scotland. The earliest dated book in the Litill Collection is Marchesini’s Incipit vocabularius in Mamotrectu printed in Venice in 1478 by Renner with Bartum. The latest dated volume is from 1577, three years before Litill’s death: In D. Pauli priorem Epistolem by Daneau, printed in Geneva by Vignon.