| Catalogue | Collections | Home | History | Contact us |
Chetham's Library began acquiring material in August 1655, and has been adding to its collections ever since. The variety of forms, sizes and shapes is considerable, from large folio books to manuscript diaries, letters and deeds, to prints, paintings and glass lantern-slides. In these pages we try to give a picture of those collections under three broad headings, printed matter, archives and manuscripts, and photographs and pictures.
Chetham's Library holds more than 100,000 volumes of printed books, of which 60,000 were published before 1851. These include particularly rich collections of sixteenth and seventeenth-century printed works, periodicals and journals, broadsides and other ephemera.
If you want to search for specific printed works at the library please go to the catalogue. If you would like to know more about the shape of the collections in general and to browse some images, please go to our pages on print.
Chetham's has built up substantial holdings of manuscripts and archives since it began collecting in the 1650s. If you are interested in learning about the collections in general, please go to the Introduction to Chetham's archives and manuscripts. Our Handlist of Manuscripts provides a detailed listing of the collections, with a comprehensive hyperlinked index.
We'll be putting up descriptive and illustrative pages about various of the Library's archival collections in the future. The current attraction is a page about the ever popular Belle Vue Archive.
Over the course of time the Library has accumulated a wide range of images and pictures, particularly in the form of glass lantern slides. They are a window into vanished worlds; see some of them at our photographs and pictures pages.
| Catalogue | Collections | Home | History | Contact us |
Read the copyright declaration.