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Dr William Zachs
Dr William Zachs is the founder and director of the Blackie House Library and Museum. Located in the heart of Edinburgh Old Town, BHLM is a research centre and exhibition space of some 45,000 items. The collection includes rare books and manuscripts, paintings, prints, sculpture and photography — along with antiquities, decorative objects, textiles, furniture and items from nature. The core collection tells the story of Scotland in the very long eighteenth century but extends far beyond. A registered Scottish charity, BHLM is open to researchers, groups and others by appointment.
Currently an Honorary Fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Bill came from the United States in 1983 to study at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with an MSc in 1985 and a PhD in 1989. He holds a Masters of Library and Information Science from California State University. In 2013, the University of Edinburgh granted him an Honorary Doctor of Letters. He is the patron of the David Laing Student Book Collecting Prize.
A collector and scholar, Bill is the author of The First John Murray and the Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade (1998), Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart, 1743-1786 (1992) and several scholarly and popular articles, reviews and exhibition catalogues. He lectures internationally on such topics as ‘The History and Art of Letter-Writing before, during and after the Digital Age’, ‘The Thousand-Year History of the Illustrated Book – a Story in Ten Volumes’, ‘The Private Library of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’, ‘Authenticity and Duplicity: Investigations into Multiple Copies of Books’, and much more.