Blog

1. Private View

   Readers are cordially invited to the Private View of our ‘Danger and Destiny’ exhibition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, next Tuesday 13th November at 6pm for 6.30pm. There will be wine...

   7th November 2012 • Read more

2. In den beghinne was dat woert

   We were pleased to have a visit from early modern history students from Manchester University yesterday, and among the items we showed them was this Fasciculus temporum printed in 1480....

   7th November 2012 • Read more

3. A first look at the Clay Scrapbook

     The newest addition to the Library’s collection of 19th-century scrapbooks is this gloriously grangerized copy of George R. Catt’s The pictorial history of Manchester. Catt’s 41-page history forms the...

   2nd November 2012 • Read more

4. 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...

   2nd November 2012 • Read more

5. 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....

   1st November 2012 • Read more

6. 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...

   31st October 2012 • Read more

7. 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...

   26th October 2012 • Read more

8. 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...

   24th October 2012 • Read more

9. 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...

   22nd October 2012 • Read more

10. 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:...

    19th October 2012 • Read more