Tag Archive: Collections

1. 

   Binding Books for Chetham’s Library

   Visitors to the library often ask whether our books are in their original bindings, or whether they have been bound or rebound since they arrived in our collection. Although the...

   22nd October 2026 • Read more

2. 

   ‘A Sweetness … Which Tickles Even While it Hurts’: Absalom and Achitophel (1681) by John Dryden, a Seventeenth-Century Political Satire

   Chetham’s Library was established well over two centuries before English Literature was considered a subject worthy of academic study. Initial book purchases concentrated on works of Theology, Classics, History, Law,...

   27th August 2026 • Read more

3. 

   Fit for a King: Royal Bindings in Chetham’s Library

   Although many of the books in Chetham’s Library’s collection were bound for the library, some books came to the library already bound, and these bindings reveal something of their histories...

   5th August 2026 • Read more

4. 

   Births, Deaths, Marriages and Chickens: Strange Finds in the Margins

   Readers’ marks are a common phenomenon in the books in Chetham’s Library: particularly in the early modern period between c. 1500 and c. 1700, readers frequently annotated their books, adding...

   10th April 2026 • Read more

5. 

   The Afterlives of John Dee’s Books

   By the 1570s, John Dee had established at his home of Mortlake what has been described as the largest and most diverse library in Elizabethan England, containing—according to Dee—three thousand...

   28th February 2026 • Read more

6. 

   Shakespeare’s Third Folio: Early Readers and Their Marginalia

   Chetham’s Library’s copy of the 1664 Third Folio, the subject of a recent blog post, is a handsome complete copy in an eighteenth-century dark blue calfskin binding, with decorative gilt...

   12th February 2026 • Read more

7. 

   Shakespeare’s Third Folio: The Page vs. the Stage

   One of the most fascinating books in Chetham’s Library’s less well-known literature collection is a copy of Mr William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories and tragedies, published according to the true original copies,...

   7th January 2026 • Read more

8. 

   Cataloguing the Cass Collection

   Maisie, our placement student, recently completed a project to finish cataloguing the Cass Collection, which originally arrived at Chetham’s Library in 2016: Between January and April, I spent 20 days...

   12th May 2025 • Read more