Blog

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson

   When Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait of Mary Robinson as ‘Perdita’ from The Winter’s Tale in 1782, her affair with the Prince Regent had been over for a year, and...

   8th February 2012 • Read more

5. Congratulations Dr Joel

   Many congratulations to our second collaborative doctorate student Joel Swann, who was awarded a PhD from Keele University for his work on seventeenth-century prose and verse miscellanies at Chetham’s Library....

   8th February 2012 • Read more

6. Who was Apothecary Thyer?

   Find out about this eighteenth-century Manchester character as well as others including Little Major and Ogden the Fish Porter in this week’s 101 Treasures Post.

   1st February 2012 • Read more

7. Animal, vegetable or mineral?

   Despite its sheep-like appearance, our latest ‘monstrum’ is a member of the vegetable family. This 18th-century engraving shows Polypodium barometz, a fern native to China, whose animal-like appearance and distant...

   19th January 2012 • Read more

8. Criminal Manchester: Experiences of a Special Correspondent

   This slim volume, published in Manchester in the 1880s, comprises ten chapters reprinted from the Manchester Evening News exploring Manchester’s underworld. In each chapter, our man from the Evening News,...

   13th January 2012 • Read more

9. Manchester of Today

   As part of our ongoing digitisation work, we are pleased to make available Manchester of Today: an epitome of results and its sister volume Liverpool of Today, both dating from...

   13th January 2012 • Read more

10. Conservation Grants

    We are delighted to announce that the Library has recently been awarded two significant grants, which will enable the preservation of some of our most important and valuable books. Restoring...

    11th January 2012 • Read more