Welcome to 2025! Our first article on the Secret Library Leeds this year Librarian Antony Ramm’s brief look at the breadth and depth of books in our Central Library stacks, using Gustave Flaubert as a case study… For reasons that are not worth going into here, I have recently been reading a pile of London…
Tag: Central Library
Heritage Open Days 2023
Every September we get very excited about the Heritage Open Days festival, which this year runs from 8th – 17th September. This sees thousands of staff and volunteers across England organise events to celebrate our fantastic history and culture. It’s your chance to see hidden places and try out new experiences – all of which are FREE…
National Libraries Week 2020: The Staff of the Central Library
The penultimate piece in our week of articles celebrating the history of the Leeds Library Service – this time, taking a light-hearted look at anecdotes from staff who have called the Central Library home… ***** Library (noun) – ‘A place in which literary, musical, artistic, or reference materials (such as books, manuscripts, recordings, or films)…
National Libraries Week: The ‘Old Leeds’ Exhibition of 1908
To mark National Libraries Week, Leeds Central Library is hosting an exhibition exploring the history of the Library Service in the city. Today, Librarian Antony Ramm highlights one book series on display in that exhibition, focusing on the ‘Old Leeds’ celebrations of 1908… In the summer of 1908, over 70,000 people visited the Leeds Art…
Writing in the Margins: The Annotated Nuremberg Chronicle
This week we welcome guest author Dr Nina Adamova, British Academy Visiting Fellow at St Petersburg University, who explores a particularly interesting copy of The Nuremburg Chronicle held at the Central Library. Dr. Adamova will be delivering a talk on the same subject tomorrow at 2pm. Tickets are still available at the time of writing. …
The Leeds Savage Club: A Brief History
This week on the Secret Library, we hear from Karen Downham in our Local and Family History department, who looks at the Leeds Savage Club, a group active in the early 1900s, and whose members had a strong influence on the city of Leeds, and beyond. January 2020: Since the publication of this article, Karen…
A Partial History of Leeds Central Library
This last Wednesday, to mark National Libraries Week, four of our Local and Family History team, plus one intrepid volunteer, delivered a talk offering a brief history of Leeds Central Library, primarily derived from material found in several volumes of news-cuttings covering public libraries in Leeds. So, this week on the Secret Library we offer…
‘Half a cup of cream which nobody else seemed to want’: The American Diary of a Leeds Librarian
Guest blogger Val Hewson is a researcher for Reading Sheffield, an oral history project about popular reading in the mid-20th century. This has led her to research library services in Sheffield and elsewhere. In the Leeds Local and Family History Library, she read a diary belonging to F.G.B. Hutchings, Chief Librarian of Leeds between 1946…
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