Blog

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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