The Scottish owners of a post-incunable from the library of N. P. Likhachev
The article concerns a post-incunable from the holdings of the Rare book department of the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences (BAN). The book is marked with the bookplate of N. P. Likhachev, as well as the marks of other owners, some of which can be tentatively identiﬁed as the Scottish Earls of Crawford or their near relatives. By drawing upon palaeographic data, literature on Scottish bookbinding and an online database of British armorial bindings, and by turning for help to the Libraries of the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the author has been able to reﬁne the attribution as regarding the owners of the book in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries. In patricular, it has been possible to attribute the supralibros with high probability to the ninth Earl of Crawford (d. 1558) and his eldest son Sir David Lindsay of Edzell (d. 1610) who didn’t inherit the title. The post-incunable doesn’t come from the famous «Lindesiana» - the library gathered by the twenty ﬁfth and twenty sixth Earls of Crawford in the XIX century. In the concluding part of the article, hypotheses are stated about the sequence of the post-incunable’s XXth century owners before BAN: N. P. Likhachev, I. I. Yasinski and the «Antikvariat» bookshop.