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)…
Tag: Central Library
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…
Read More: Little Chunks of History
by Ross Horsley and Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library This is an entry in our Read More series. These are ‘long-form’ articles, where staff offer a curated and detailed look at areas of our book collections, usually based around a specific theme or subject. These posts aim to guide the interested reader through to those…
Slightly Spooky
Everyone loves a ghost story at Christmas don’t they? These real-life tales of haunted houses (left) are taken from the first volume of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Originally launched in 1882 to, in its members’ own words, make “an organised and systematic attempt to investigate that large group of debatable phenomena designated…
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