Blog

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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...

   19th October 2012 • Read more

6. 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...

   19th October 2012 • Read more

7. 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...

   15th October 2012 • Read more

8. An Account of the Foxglove

   This week we take a closer look at William Withering’s seminal work on digitalis, the first to properly study its use in the treatment of heart disease. Withering himself was...

   12th October 2012 • Read more

9. Donne over

   This week’s website treasure is our first edition of the poetry of John Donne. Although incomplete, it’s a significant work, not least because of a piece of additional verse written...

   5th October 2012 • Read more

10. That sinking feeling…

    This week’s flooding reminds us that some parts of the region are especially vulnerable to natural disasters. Northwich, which flooded earlier this week, has a history of flooding dating back...

    28th September 2012 • Read more