‘A day of great triumph’ – the Lord Mayor’s Show at 800
On Saturday 14 November the annual spectacle of the Lord Mayor’s Show, which started life eight centuries ago in the year of Magna Carta, will […]
Continue reading »Category: Special Collections
The Red Book of Thorney: A Cartulary and its Conservation
The cartulary of Thorney Abbey, known as the Red Book of Thorney, is a large 2-volume work begun in the early years of the fourteenth century, […]
Continue reading »
From Andalusia to Cambridge
This year the University Library celebrates the three hundredth anniversary of the acquisition of the Royal Library; this gift from King George I brought to […]
Continue reading »
Cambridgeshire customs on camera
Guest post by Stephen Roberts. The Eastern Counties Folklore Society was established at a meeting held in Cambridge on 18 November 1932, to investigate, collect […]
Continue reading »
His Royal Favour: the Books that Built the Library
The University Library’s latest exhibition looks in detail at the formation and arrival in Cambridge of the Royal Library, a collection that has been at […]
Continue reading »
Rupert Brooke: 100 years on
The latest exhibition to occupy the Library’s Entrance Hall cases concerns Rupert Brooke, who died a century ago this year (23 April 1915) and was […]
Continue reading »
‘It’s all in a day’s work’: the Royal Greenwich Observatory Audio-Visual Collection, Stories of Observatory Life
For many people the work of the astronomers at the Royal Greenwich Observatory seems like the stuff of science fiction. Observing distant stars, recording sunspots, […]
Continue reading »
‘Plots upon the stage’: Restoration drama in the University Library
In the 1980s the Library acquired two significant collections of seventeenth-century literature: the Brett-Smith collection of Restoration drama and the Verney collection of political and […]
Continue reading »
Decorated paper wrappers in the University Library
There are many beautiful books in the University Library, from illuminated medieval manuscripts to illustrated private press books of the nineteenth-century. In addition to the […]
Continue reading »
Make and Create
It’s not often that librarians get to work under canvas but this year the UL took part in the Cambridge University Museums Make and Create […]
Continue reading »