Shorthand material

Aulay Macaulay's Polygraphy, 1747

One of the finest collections in Britain in the field of shorthand, comprised of approximately 650 printed works, including journals and 20 manuscripts. It is based mainly on two private collections, that of the poet John Byrom (1692-1763) which was donated by his descendants in 1870, and of John Harland of the Manchester Guardian, acquired on his death in 1868. The collection is notable for the number of very rare, and in some cases possibly unique, editions of the seventeenth century or earlier, of which John O'Donnell gives some impression in his British shorthand libraries (1906). The collection also contains large numbers of books, many of them very rare, on cryptography, spelling reform, and universal languages.

  
John Byrom's influential Universal English shorthand, printed in Manchester, 1767
and Thomas Gurney's Brachygraphy, 1750

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