Edinburgh

Cabinet 18

The first issue of The Scottish Chapbook appeared in August 1922. Founded and edited by C. M. Grieve (or the poet Hugh MacDiarmid as he was soon to become), it would establish him as the father of the Scottish Renaissance movement.

MacDiarmid believed strongly in a Scottish literary renaissance and predicted a ‘Scottish Renascence as swift and irresistible as was the Belgian Revival between 1880 and 1910.’

This issue, with the familiar motto ‘Not Traditions – Precedents’, contains an extract from MacDiarmid’s own ‘A Kist o’ Whistles’.

The Scottish Chapbook. Vol. I, no. 7 (February 1923). [Montrose: C. M. Grieve, 1923].