Gems

When the Lit & Phil was established in 1793 a library was not at the forefront of the minds of its founders. The emphasis was on lectures, discussion and experiments. However, as the years went by the scope of the collection widened. In 1811 the first catalogue shows there is a burgeoning collection of voyages and travels, history, biography, poetry and classics.

When in 1825 the Lit & Phil moved into its present home, the collection numbered some 8,000 volumes. It now contains something in the region of almost 200,000, and we add about another 1,000 every year. In 1891 novels were eventually permitted into the collection!

The library’s broad nature is its strength and the Society can be proud of its historic as well as its contemporary collections – from the several hundred volumes printed before 1701 to newly published crime fiction, the library has something for everyone.

In such a wide ranging collection there are quite a few strange, interesting or simply bizarre items. Here are just a few – come and see what you can find…

From A Beuk o’ Newcassel Sangs. Collected by Joseph Crawhall,  1888.

From ‘Proportional Form’ by Samuel Colman and C. Arthur Coan, 1920.

‘Sun Dials and Roses of Yesterday’. 1902
Alice Morse Earle

From ‘Grevillea Atlas, consisting of thirty-seven plates of Hymenomycetal Fungi’, by M.C. Cooke, 1882

‘The History of the Church of Chester-le-Street’ by the Rev. John Dodd, M.A., 1856.

The Dodo and its Kindred by H.E. Strickland and A.G.Melvile, pub 1848.
This seminal 1848 monograph sets out to separate the myth from reality regarding perhaps the world’s most famous extinct bird.