National Library of Scotland

This guide to the National Library of Scotland traces how a biscuit fortune rescued the Advocates Library, the private lawyers' collection founded in the 1680s that had outgrown what the Faculty of Advocates could maintain. You'll hear about Sir Alexander Grant of McVitie and Price, the Edinburgh baker who signed a blank cheque for the collection in the 1920s, and the digestive biscuit recipe that made his fortune decades earlier. The building on George IV Bridge itself took nearly two decades to complete, its work interrupted by war.