This blog post first appeared earlier this week on Our Country Lives: the new MERL blog.  The Shell Guides we already hold mentioned below are part of our Printing Collection.  Written by Claire Wooldridge, Project Senior Library Assistant: Landscape Institute. The Shell Guides, published between 1934 and 1984, were designed to be light hearted but engaging guide books to […]

This post comes from Brian Ryder, one of our volunteers here at Special Collections. Brian’s history with Reading collections is a long one; he used to be one of our project cataloguers and is now working his way through the Routledge & Kegan Paul archive. Here, upon the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alun Lewis, […]

This Saturday 13th June is the 150th Anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats, with events taking place across the UK, Ireland and beyond. Here at Special Collections we thought we’d get out a few of our Yeats’ treasures and David, our Graduate Trainee Library Assistant, has written a piece introducing the man himself. […]

What better way to celebrate May being National Share-a-Story Month and 15 May being the International Day of Families – than a chance to look at some of the highlights of our Children’s Collection!  The theme of 2015’s National Share-a-Story Month is dragons! Our Children’s Collection currently comprises over 6,000 books and journals written for children. Most […]

Written by Fiona Melhuish, UMASCS Librarian Whilst retrieving an item for a reader, I came across a wonderful selection of illuminated manuscript leaves and original leaves from books by early printers (that I didn’t know we had!) in the John Lewis Printing Collection, which we hold here in Special Collections. This collection has not been […]

Georgia Charitou, intern from Greece, shares some further highlights from her work on the Stenton Coin Collection, which spans the 7th to the 20th century. Previously: Bloodaxe, Vikings and other early coins. Today Constantine to Victoria! Constantine X  (1006–1067) (574*) Constantine X Doukas was Emperor of the Byzantine Empire from 1059–1067. During his reign he issued silver […]

I am Georgia Charitou, and I am an intern from Greece, where I study at the University of Thessaly. For the last couple of months I’ve been working on the Stenton Coin Collection owned by the University’s Special Collections and Department of Archaeology, which span from the 7th to the 20th century. The main task […]

100 years ago in 1915, jobbing printer Wills & Hepworth published the very first Ladybird book in Loughborough. They soon registered an official logo and devoted themselves creating ‘pure and healthy’ literature for children. After the WWII, the publisher expanded its remit to include educational nonfiction, and Ladybird books have been a beloved part of […]