Blog

1. The Pigmy Revels

   A hand-coloured juvenile flap-book produced in 1773 on two separate copper-etched sheets telling the story tells of the elopement of Harlequin and Columbine. Read more on our 101 Treasures page…

   30th March 2012 • Read more

2. Victoria Bridge on a Saturday Night…

   We have recently bought a large collection of street songs and ballads published in Manchester and the North West during the mid-nineteenth century. The collection was made by the antiquarian...

   30th March 2012 • Read more

3. Manchester, so much to answer for…

   Our new exhibition examines the way Manchester’s history has been recorded over the centuries and the ways in which its civic pride and regional identity have developed, from the earliest...

   29th March 2012 • Read more

4. Canons to the left of him!

   We are delighted to announce that Chetham’s Librarian Michael Powell has been made an Honorary Lay Canon of Manchester Cathedral and will be installed by the Dean at Evensong on...

   29th March 2012 • Read more

5. Getting stoned

   Ironic perhaps that a Christian denomination famous for its commitment to temperance should have as an early proponent a gentleman named William Seward, who ended up getting stoned… Of course...

   16th March 2012 • Read more

6. Flowers on Friday

   This week’s 101 Treasures explores one of the Library’s manuscript gems: Matthew Paris’s Flores Historiarum, or Flowers of Histories, written in the mid-thirteenth century at St Albans. Find out more...

   2nd March 2012 • Read more

7. Are you celebrating the Feast of St Matthias?

   According to this page of the 1549 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, today is the Feast of St Matthias, in honour of which the owner of the book...

   24th February 2012 • Read more

8. A secret ticket…

   It’s two hundred years since the Luddites attacked looms in the textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire as part of their protest against the mechanisation of the weaving industry. Find...

   17th February 2012 • Read more

9. Did you forget Valentine’s Day?

   Well, don’t bother with all those rubbish cut-price cards and reduced flower arrangements… Take a look instead at this beautiful nineteenth-century handwritten Valentine’s letter with pictorial clues and see if...

   15th February 2012 • Read more

10. Birthday look-alikes

    Senior Librarian at Chetham’s Library – One of the greatest writers of all time By an amazing coincidence, it so happens that Charles Dickens and Senior Librarian Fergus Wilde share...

    8th February 2012 • Read more