The Lady’s Magazine

This week on the blog we hear from Library & Digital Assistant Becky Bavill, who explores and illuminates the rich history of an 18th and 19th-century journal… The Lady’s Magazine – not to be confused with The Lady Magazine – was a popular publication in the 18th and 19th centuries, running from 1770 to 1818…

Novels That Shaped Our World

To tie in with the BBC 100 Novels That Shaped Our World list we have organised a series of events and workshops to inspire people to read some of the amazing books that feature on the list. Here are just a few examples from our collections that came to mind when we thought of four…

New Armley Research Guide

This week Josh Flint will discuss the new Local and Family History Research Guide on Armley. This Research Guide will be of great use to anyone with an interest in the history of Armley and how that history is represented in the Leeds Central Library Collection. This article will examine interesting images highlighted in this…

The Maurice Rosenbaum Letters: A Leeds Connection

This week, we welcome University of Leeds students Amy Clayton and Lucy Slater as guest authors. Amy and Lucy have been investigating a new addition to the Central Library collections – the letters of Maurice Rosenbaum – over the last few months. Here, they explain who Maurice was and his connection to Leeds and Yorkshire….

Speed-dating our Library Treasures II: Small Books and Big Ideas

by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library You may recall that, during our 2016 Library Fest programme, we trialled a new event: Speed-date our Library Treasures. Put simply, this was an opportunity for the public to engage with a wide range of some of our most interesting and unique stock items, all curated by…

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…

Highlights from our Special Collections: Helvetius’ De l’esprit

by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library The stacks in the Central Library hold around 250,000 items, a dizzying array of materials covering a vast multitude of fields. This ‘stack stock’ is split into a few main sections: around 40,000 books available for loan; our archived journal holdings; and our Special Collections. While the majority of these…