Archive: 2012

  1. A special visitor

    We had a visit from book artist Carolyn Trant recently, who came all the way from Lewes to see the Grimms’ Fairytales exhibition and wrote a lovely blogpost about us...

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  2. The only book you’ll ever need

    Edward Coote’s The English School-Master was first published in 1596. A slender book, it was nonetheless designed to contain everything necessary for teaching students of all ages to read and write in English....

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  3. A full and plain evidence concerning witches

      As it’s Hallowe’en it’s time for something a bit witchy and where better to start than the ‘evidence’ presented by Joseph Glanvill in his popular work of 1681 Sadducismus...

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  4. Brains not beauty

    This week’s treasure is no great beauty, but is of huge significance to the study of history and the birth of social science. Thomas Percival’s Enumeration of the houses and...

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  5. The Bondage of Pleasure

    We have recently acquired The Bondage of Pleasure: Reminiscences of social life in Lancashire, Yorkshire and North Wales, a small pamphlet published in Manchester in 1910. The author, a clergyman...

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  6. Tudor marginalia

    An extraordinarily beautiful series of decorated annotations has been revealed in the Library copy of George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum historia, published in Edinburgh in 1582.   The annotations were made...

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  7. The drum solo from Hell…

      Just as you think the guitar is going to come back in, you realise that actually it’s going on for an eternity… Engraving by William Faithorne from Sadducismus Triumphatus:...

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  8. Fashion forward

    It’s common knowledge that here at the Library we’re at the cutting edge of high fashion, so obviously we’re delighted to be featured in the Manchester volume of the new...

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  9. Paradise Lost

    New on the 101 Treasures page today, a look at two of the Library’s copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost, including a beautifully bound 1770 edition by the Foulis Press in...

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  10. The ways of mad folk

    A browse through William Asheton Tonge’s bound set of The East Lancashire Review led to the discovery of a magnificently un-PC article entitled ‘The Ways of Mad Folk’, written by...

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