Vicki Louise Bond McLeod was born Jan. 20, 1952, in Morgantown, the only child of Donovan Heiner Bond and Helen Louise Dent, who both descended from pioneer Western Virginia settlers of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Vicki acquired a continuing love of history and of the culture of West Virginia from her father, who was a journalism professor at West Virginia University and for 20 years the founder and executive director of the West Virginia University Foundation. Vicki inherited a deep commitment to the equal rights of women in pay and opportunity from her mother, who was one of the first female reporters on a major West Virginia paper.
After graduating in 1972 from West Virginia University, Vicki was first the research assistant for W. Reynolds McLeod. They were married in 1974. Together, they researched, edited and wrote both scholarly and popular books, pamphlets and broadsheets. Their collaborations included research in the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, United Kingdom, the North Library of the British Library and in the rare book collections of Harvard, Yale, Indiana and the University of Kansas. Vicki was an enumerative, descriptive and analytical bibliographer, recognized throughout the scholarly community in Britain and the United States for her work on Anglo-Scottish Tracts, and The Graphical Directory of English Newspapers. From 1979, she and her husband operated Unicorn Limited Inc./Scotpress. They edited, wrote, reprinted and published a wide range of popular and scholarly works on Scottish, Irish, Celtic and Scandinavian history and culture.
Vicki authored several cookbooks. One, entitled “Scottish Cooking for American Kitchens,” has been a classic study of Scottish cuisine for over 30 years. For 10 years, Vicki contributed a regular column on Irish and Scottish cuisine to the Scottish-American Newspaper. Her extensive collection of regional American and European cookbooks is now at the Auburn University Archives. Vicki was an authority on printed bagpipe music books in the period from the late 18th century through to 1956. Over time she acquired a complete sample of all published bagpipe music books and this collection now is at St. Andrews University in North Carolina. Vicki died on Jan. 21, 2020, at her home in Auburn, Ala. She is survived by her husband.
