Archive: 2026

1. 

   Thomas de la Warre’s Trans-Atlantic Manuscript

   In a letter dated 18 February 1669, the master of Jesus College Cambridge, John Worthington, described Chetham’s Library in Manchester as ‘a fair library of books (where I might pursue...

   10th May 2026 • Read more

2. 

   Births, Deaths, Marriages and Chickens: Strange Finds in the Margins

   Readers’ marks are a common phenomenon in the books in Chetham’s Library: particularly in the early modern period between c. 1500 and c. 1700, readers frequently annotated their books, adding...

   10th April 2026 • Read more

3. 

   Lost and Found in the Library

   In the early years of the nineteenth century, Chetham’s Librarian John Taylor Allen (1812–21) made a remarkable discovery in his apartment at the library: a treasure trove of the private...

   20th March 2026 • Read more

4. 

   John Dee, Re-animator of Corpses, and Humphrey Chetham, Rejected Young Lover: Fictional Versions of Real People in W. H. Ainsworth’s Guy Fawkes (1841)

   William Harrison Ainsworth, the popular Victorian historical novelist, had a long association with Chetham’s Library. Born in King Street, Manchester, in 1805, Ainsworth attended Manchester Grammar School on the library’s...

   10th March 2026 • Read more

5. 

   The Afterlives of John Dee’s Books

   By the 1570s, John Dee had established at his home of Mortlake what has been described as the largest and most diverse library in Elizabethan England, containing—according to Dee—three thousand...

   28th February 2026 • Read more

6. 

   Shakespeare’s Third Folio: Early Readers and Their Marginalia

   Chetham’s Library’s copy of the 1664 Third Folio, the subject of a recent blog post, is a handsome complete copy in an eighteenth-century dark blue calfskin binding, with decorative gilt...

   12th February 2026 • Read more

7. 

   John Dee and Alchemy

   When John Dee initially sought appointment as the warden of a collegiate church following his travels on the continent, Manchester was far from his mind. Instead, he had fixed his...

   29th January 2026 • Read more

8. 

   Shakespeare’s Third Folio: The Page vs. the Stage

   One of the most fascinating books in Chetham’s Library’s less well-known literature collection is a copy of Mr William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories and tragedies, published according to the true original copies,...

   7th January 2026 • Read more