Mary Queen of Scots’ Last Letter in National Library of Scotland Centenary Programme

The National Library of Scotland is marking its 100th birthday with a year-long programme of events and initiatives. 
  
The holder of the largest collection of antiquarian books north of Cambridge, it is a ‘legal deposit’ library with the right to claim a copy of everything published in the UK, including digital publications. It will use its centenary as a platform to celebrate and promote libraries of all kinds, beginning with a nationwide campaign encouraging people to support and champion their local libraries around Valentine’s Day. 

Centenary Champion author Val McDermid, said: “My parents couldn’t afford books but they understood they were the passport to better life chances than they’d had. But it’s not just writers who have their doors opened to the wider world by libraries. Engineers, lawyers, builders, artists, geographers, mathematicians, musicians… the list is endless. Libraries open windows that let us all fly.”

The National Library will be hosting celebrations at its Edinburgh home on George IV Bridge, beginning on March 28 Centenary Champions author and broadcaster Damian Barr and Val McDermid in conversation about their love for libraries with National Librarian Amina Shah.

A special centenary exhibition opens in June. Taking over two of the Library’s exhibition spaces, Dear Library will be an open reading room for Edinburgh. Produced in collaboration with people and partners across the country, the exhibition is a love letter to libraries. Visitors will be able to browse through bookshelves filled with recommendations gathered from a public callout and from well-known Scottish figures, and be invited to consider and share the books that shaped them. The exhibition will also contain depictions of librarians and libraries in popular culture, protest banners and badges reflecting libraries under threat, footage from the Moving Image Archive bringing libraries of the past to life, as well as items loaned from specialist libraries from around Scotland: the Nature Library, Glasgow Women’s Library, Innerpeffray Library, Skye Zine Library and the Library of Mistakes.

In the Treasures exhibition, founding collections items gifted to the Library in 1925 will go on display in a special Centenary exhibit. The Glenriddell Manuscript, which contains some of Robert Burns’s most important works and spans the majority of his literary career, as well as the Order for the Massacre of Glencoe, which resulted in one of the most infamous events in Scottish history, will be on public view for a year, along with other important artefacts from the Library’s founding in 1925. Displays relating to the Library’s history and collections will also take place at the National Library’s Glasgow home, Kelvin Hall.

To mark the Library’s centenary with communities around the country, selected treasures from the collections will be leaving Edinburgh to go on display outside of the central belt. Outwith: National Library around Scotland will begin in Aberdeen Art Gallery in September with a loan of an early edition of Scottish secular music, John Forbes' Songs and Fancies, published in Aberdeen in 1682. 

In January 2026, Mary Queen of Scots’ last letter will leave the National Library for the first time in a generation to go on display in the heart of the new Perth Museum, close to the Stone of Destiny. Written by Mary Queen of Scots the night before her execution on February 8, 1587 to her brother-in-law, Henri III of France, this was last publicly exhibited at the Library’s George IV Bridge building in 2017 where queues formed to see the item during its one-day display. 

The National Library was established by an Act of Parliament in 1925, and since then has amassed and cared for a collection of more than 50 million items spanning many centuries on behalf of the people of Scotland, all of whom are entitled to free access to the collections.