This exhibition marks the 120th anniversary of McDonald Road Library.
Thomas Nelson had bequeathed £50,000 for “the erection, furnishing, maintenance and management of shelter halls in the poor districts of Edinburgh, to be used as places to which persons of the working class and others, can go and sit and read, write, converse, and otherwise occupy themselves”. McDonald Road was to be the third such building after Fountainbridge (1897) and Stockbridge (1900).