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- 101 Treasures of Chetham’s
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- The Flowers of Histories
- A Book of Hours from France
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- Thomas Barritt of Manchester
- Art Treasures Examiner of 1857
- Manchester Association for Constitutional Order
- The North Western Museum of Science and Industry: Some Reminiscences by Richard Hills
- Criminal Manchester
- The Cup of Destiny
- Athenaeum Souvenir
- Middle English Manuscripts
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- Hollingworth’s Mancuniensis
- Memoir of Cecil Wray
- William Seward’s Diary
- The Anti-Monopolist
- Fishwick’s History of Rochdale
- Knyvett’s Defence of this Realm
- Tractatus de Nigromantia
- Axon Ballads
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Donated Collections
The Library has received a number of donations over the years including:
John Radcliffe Collection:
Over 1,000 printed books collected by John Radcliffe (1845-1911), the son of a successful Lancashire manufacturer. Particularly strong in genealogy and heraldry, nearly all of the material is pre-1851, with possibly as much as half being pre-1800, and including material dating as far back as the late sixteenth century.
William Assheton Tonge (1860-1936) Collection:
About 3,000 volumes mostly of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. While the collection includes several hundred eighteenth-century sermons and c. 300 volumes of English poetry, and also many works on genealogy and heraldry, the emphasis is on the topography, archaeology and antiquities of Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. There is also much material of biographical value, including many volumes of local biography, c. 70 eighteenth and nineteenth-century directories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and 44 volumes of manuscript extracts from parish registers.
Leech Collection:
350 works given in 1994-95, collected by the Manchester medic and historian Ernest Bosdin Leech (1875-1950). The collection includes a large number of ephemeral publications relating to the University and the City Council and an interesting selection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century books, prints and maps of Manchester.
MRIAS Collection:
The library is also home to a large engineering collection relating to the Manchester Region Industrial Archaeology Society. The archive contains, but is not limited to, a collection of 175 archaeological reports by members and other bodies, printed books, and other ephemera, all donated by the society itself on a continuous basis from the early 21st century.
Cass Collection:
Over 600 volumes donated by the family of scholar and bibliophile Eddie Cass (1937-2014) in 2016. The Cass Collection comprises works local to the north west, with an emphasis on dialect writing and working class perspectives. The material dates from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, and includes novels, pamphlets, essays, dictionaries, poetry collections, plays, songbooks, biographies, and more.
