Join us for our second Twilight Talks which highlight how NLI collections have informed, shaped, or transformed Readers' research. Join us for a series of three Twilight Talks, each just fifteen minutes! These talks are are intended to showcase the depth of scholarship, creativity and discovery emerging from registered readers' engagement with the library’s collections. Please find a brief abstract of each presentation below. Novels, smelling salts, and "Sympathetic Ink for Secret Correspondence": how one circulating library served readers in early nineteenth-century Dublin | Dr Karen Wade Before the advent of the public library system, there were the circulating libraries: businesses, large and small, which allowed members of the public to subscribe and borrow books for a fee. While some libraries might have been just a shelf of racy novels at the back of a stationer's shop, others offered a much wider variety of reading material, and might also provide more unusual goods and services to its patrons. In this talk, we take a visit to the Apollo Library. The Apollo prided itself on its extensive collection of books of all kinds. Patrons could also shop for stationery, household items, medication, and makeup, and could even place ads for domestic servants, tutors and real estate. As this talk will demonstrate, the Apollo Library Catalogue opens a window into what life was like for enthusiastic readers in pre-Victorian Dublin, and also shows how library keepers and patrons understood themselves as part of a broader international reading community at the start of the nineteenth century. The Paradoxes of a Life: the Eleanor Wicklow Papers at the National Library of Ireland | Olivia Frehill Eleanor Wicklow was a member of a prominent architectural family who would go on to become the Countess of Wicklow, she came from a position of privilege but worked and advocated for some of the poorest and most marginalised through her charitable projects and work for the Labour party

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