by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library The following article was edited for publication as part of last Friday’s collaboration with the Norfolk Heritage Centre. This is the unedited version and forms Part III of a loose trilogy on (some) meanings in the study of local history. Part I is here; Part…
Author: Leeds Libraries
William Darby in Norwich and Leeds: Life and Death
This week on the Secret Library we welcome Orla Kennelly from the Norfolk Heritage Centre. Orla kindly agreed to write a section for our blog focusing on the circus manager and performer, William Darby – aka Pablo Fanque. Darby was born in Norwich, but is buried in Leeds; Orla’s section looks at Darby’s early years, while our part concentrates…
Shakespeare and the Art world
by Adam Barham, Art Library. Many artists have felt compelled to depict the plays of Shakespeare. Some are attracted to Shakespeare’s universal themes and complex characters, which inspire them to produce stirring representations of the plays’ inner meanings. Others appreciate his combination of exotic locations and sparse scene descriptions, which leave them free to create…
Meeting the Ghosts of the Brontë Family
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library In his book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), James Shapiro makes the point that “every literature professor is in the business of speaking to the dead” and that, by extension, “communicating with the dead is what we all do…[e]very time we pick up a volume of Milton…
A.R. Turner’s Ironmongery Catalogue: The Communication of History
Part II in a loose trilogy of posts exploring (some) meanings behind the study of local history. Part I is here and Part III is here This article is also #17 in our People of Leeds series by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library “How much history can be communicated by pressure on a…
On Our Blog Post Dated 1st April, 2016
Fans of H.P. Lovecraft’s work – in particular, his Necronomicon – will have no doubt spotted our April Fool’s joke last Friday, aptly described by a colleague as a “goof and a spoof“. For everyone else, it’s time for us to come clean: we don’t really hold a book with the contents as described in that blog…
On a Mysterious and Unusual Book
As recently as our last post, we described the excitement we feel when an interesting item from our collections is brought to our attention by a reader or customer. Another such case has emerged this week: a visitor from Massachusetts asked to see a series of books held in our Special Collections that touched on the…
Lady Charlotte Guest’s Translation of The Mabinogion
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library Our Collections at the Central Library are, as we saw last week, wide-ranging. While we endeavor to know those Collections in as much detail as possible, we – you may be surprised to hear! – can’t and don’t know about every item we hold. That’s why…
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