Chetham's Library News

Book signing and reading from Livi Michael's new book The Angel Stone

Livi Michael, one of the Library's favourite authors, has just published her latest book, The Angel Stone.

Book History Research Network Study Day, 28 April 2005

New books with Chetham's connections

The Library continues to add books of local interest to the stock and welcomes the donation of individual works and collections. In what is clearly a vintage period for local history books, we are especially pleased to add books that have made extensive use of the Library's archival and illustrated holdings. These include Terry Wyke's The Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, the latest in a series of guides to public sculpture in Britain prepared as part of the national recording project of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association. The book is a comprehensive, 513-page guide to the statues, busts, obelisks, fountains, war memorials and occasional towers of the city and its region and provides a complete, illustrated catalogue and guide to the public monuments and sculpture of Greater Manchester, covering everything from the spectacular Victorian legacy to innovative contemporary sculpture. The book recently won the Portico Prize for the best book published on the North West of England. In addition to being one of Manchester's most distinguished historians, Terry can claim to be its most prolific, with two other books published in the last few months: The Hall of fame: a history of the Free Trade Hall (Manchester: Radisson Edwardian, 2004), and Moving Manchester, a collection of essays edited by Terry and by Derek Brumhead on the history of transport in the region (Manchester: Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 2004).

Another new title is Lords of misrule: hostility to aristocracy in late nineteenth-century- and early twentieth-century Britain, by Tony Taylor of Sheffield Hallam University. This is a book about the political, social and moral failings of aristocracy and the ways in which they have featured in political rhetoric. Drawing on the views of critics of aristocracy, it explores the dark side of power without responsibility. Less 'patrician paragons' than dissolute and debauched debtors, the aristocrats featured here undermined, rather than augmented, the fabric of national life. For the first time, Lords of Misrule recaptures the views of those radicals and reformers who were prepared to contemplate a Britain without aristocrats. The book reproduces a number of cartoons from the Library's collection of political ephemera.

Simon Inglis's Played in Manchester: the architectural heritage of a city at play is the first in a series of books on Britain's sporting heritage planned by English Heritage over the next two years. The book follows a pilot study of the buildings and places that established Manchester as a place of pilgrimage for fans of sports as diverse as football, cricket, rugby, hockey, bowls, billiards and snooker, real tennis, target archery, water polo and lacrosse. It focuses on buildings and open spaces in the M60 loop including areas of Salford, Trafford and Stockport. By bringing some of these important but little known sites to wider public attention, the book hopes to revive interest in their survival - and avert the threat of the bulldozer.

The Buildings of England: Lancashire: Manchester and the South East by Clare Hartwell and Matthew Hyde (Yale University Press, 2004) is the first part of a planned three-volume survey of the buildings of Lancashire, completely revised and thoroughly expanded from Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's two volumes of 1969. The book is published in a larger format, and at almost 750 pages, is twice the length of the original, allowing subjects to be covered in greater depth and including descriptions of places that were passed over by Pevsner. It builds on Clare Hartwell's 2001 Pevsner Architectural Guide to Manchester, but also uncovers a wealth of new information for an area described by Pevsner as 'the most difficult I have had to describe'. The works includes an extensive description of the Chetham's buildings and makes extensive use of images and pictures contained in the Library.

One of the more interesting books to be added to the collection in recent months is Livi Michael's The Whispering Road (Puffin Books, 2005). A work of fiction aimed at teenage children, the book is a splendid historical novel of Dickensian scope that tells the tale of a brother and sister who flee from a pitiful existence as servants and embark on a tough and perilous journey to Manchester in search of their mother who was forced to leave them at the workhouse when they were very young. The work provides a wonderful account of early Victorian Manchester and features real figures such as the publisher Abel Heywood and the doctor James Kay Phillips and a host of memorable fictitious characters.

New acquisitions

The Library is always interested in trying to fill gaps in the collection and welcomes the gift and deposit of both printed and archival material relevant to its collecting policy.

Victor Innes Tomlinson (1907-1996) was a well-known local historian and bibliophile. For twenty-one years he was President of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, and was an eminent member of the Society of Antiquaries, the Chetham Society, and the Manchester Bibliographical Society. His passion for books grew from an early interest in the history of Salford and his collection was built up as a working library principally related to his studies in local and Lancashire history. By the time of his death, he had amassed probably the largest private collection of local history material, filling every nook and cranny of an enormous Victorian house in Broughton, Salford. His library was bought by John Worthy of the Rochdale Book Company and books and pamphlets from the collection are still being unpacked and offered for sale, almost a decade after Victor's death. In recent months the Library has acquired a number of books from the Rochdale Book Company belonging to the Tomlinson collection. These include: The downfall of Samuel the immaculate: being a chapter from the chronicles of the city of Salford (Manchester: Abel Heywood and Son), a brief work of the late 1880s that managed to describe the gas scandal of 1887 in the form of a parody of the Old Testament Book of Kings.

"Behold in the thirty and eighth year of the reign of Victoria, Queen of the Isles, the inhabitants of Sal-ford were in deep distress owing to the condition of their pipes. In the fulness of time there arose a mighty man of Gath called Samuel, who said to the people in the distressed city: Be comforted, for I will so do that ye shall want neither the sun to rule the day nor the moon to rule the night; For I will take of the earth on which you tread, and will make thereof a light which shall gladden the hearts of all the people".

Other crackers from the collection include the programme for the opening of the Victoria Baths in September 1906. Obviously this has been made more topical in recent years ever since the bath's triumph in BBC Television's Restoration series in 2003. Although the baths secured the promise of over £3 million worth of grant aid, the renovation of the Hathersage Road site is still some way off, given the fact that the estimate for securing the whole structure and reopening one of the pools is between £18 and £20 million.

Full revelations of a professional rat catcher after 25 years' experience, by Ike Matthews (1898) is a surprisingly lengthy exposition on the profession, covering such areas as how to clear rats from warehouses, offices, storerooms, etc., how to keep and work ferrets, the habits of rats, and the life of the rat-catcher. The book is full of good practical advice and continually offers a welcome corrective to a host of false assumptions. "Speaking of bags, a good many people seem to think that if a man puts his hand into a bagful of Rats they will bite him, but I can assure you that a child could do the same thing and not be bitten. Should there be only two or three in the bag, then they will bite, but not in the event of there being a good number".

The collection also includes works on some of Victor's main interests: art and books, interests that were combined in the journal The Manchester Book: bi-monthly devoted to literature and the arts. This short-lived periodical was published in Manchester in 1927 by Richard Buckley and the illustrator A. Paxton Chadwick. Chadwick was a student at the Municipal College of Art, before becoming a leader of the Manchester Industrial Art Group. Paxton's later book illustrations are highly collectable, and include a major series of books on natural history for Penguin books. The Manchester book included work by Chadwick, including the title-page and cover design and also works of some other prominent Manchester artists, including Margaret Pilkington of the Whitworth Art Gallery. The Library has only the first two issues of The Manchester book, and it is not known whether any more were published. We would be grateful for any information about this publication.

Yet another new greetings card!

Books on Chetham's for sale

Chetham's Hospital and Library celebrated its 350th anniversary in 2003. One of the ways in which we marked that event was to help co-ordinate the publication of three new publications, the first life of Humphrey Chetham to be written in the last hundred years, a nostalgic look at Chetham's in old photographs,and an article on the history of Chetham's historic buildings. Click the covers to read more.