Andrew Grant, 910 Fifth Ave, Apt 7-B, New York, NY 10021, USA, Fax: (212) 740-3466, 
email: atnarg@aol.com acquired a manuscript, written in 1684, titled
"An Account of the Ancient and Present State of Orkney", 
by the Reverend James Wallace minister of Kirkwall from 1672 to 1688. 
Three editions have appeared of this work - 1693, 1700 and 1883. The Kirkwall library
in Orkney has the 3 editions, the first of which is extremely rare. 

Andrew has allowed scanned images of some of this manuscript's pages to be posted on
this website.  All are in JPG format which can be viewed using Photoshop as well as 
most other common graphics file viewers.  JPG files can also be imported 
into Word, WordPerfect and other wordprocessors. 

Andrew provided the following description of this manuscript:

"An account of the Ancient and Present State of Orkney", by the Reverend James Wallace,
minister of Kirkwall -- anno 1684

This is the original manuscript of Wallace’s account of Orkney, first published in 1693
and titled  “A Description of the Isles of Orkney”. This is a unique document bound in 
vellum and written in beautiful calligraphic hand.  The author was minister of Kirkwall 
from 1672 to 1688, and died in office at the age of 50.  It is a work of considerable interest
and as the first historian of Orkney, Wallace deserves special recognition.  
Three editions have been published of this work - 1693, 1700 and 1883.  
The first edition was published five years after the death of the author by his son, 
James Wallace, M.D.

The whole of this work is interesting, brightly written, and very curious.  
In addition to 83 pages of text, Wallace incorporated humorous drawings of faces into the 
lettering (some of whom are smoking a pipe), and other drawings of local interest, 
including a full page drawing of St. Magnus church, Kirkwall.  During the comparatively 
short time that Wallace occupied the chief cure of Kirkwall, he had evidently entered 
with deep interest into the life of the people and in an age of deep religious feeling 
and political difficulty, he found solace in historical research and theological investigation.  
This is a unique and special historical document of 17th century life in Orkney, 
and for that matter in all of Scotland."