Cambridge University Library Special Collections

Skipping on Parker's Piece (MS Add. 7515)

Cambridgeshire customs on camera

Posted on 7 October 2015 by Special Collections

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 […]

Archives, Manuscripts, New on Janus, Photographs, Special Collections

His Royal Favour: the Books that Built the Library

Posted on 1 October 2015 by Emily Dourish

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 […]

Collectors and collecting, Digital Resources, Exhibitions, Library history, Manuscripts, Rare Books, Special Collections

Rupert Brooke: 100 years on

Posted on 28 September 2015 by Liam Sims

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 […]

Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Collectors and collecting, Exhibitions, Manuscripts, Rare Books, Special Collections

‘It’s all in a day’s work’: the Royal Greenwich Observatory Audio-Visual Collection, Stories of Observatory Life

Posted on 21 September 2015 by Dr Emma Saunders

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, […]

Archives, Manuscripts, New on Janus, Special Collections

A Book of Magic

Posted on 14 September 2015 by Special Collections

Guest post by Dr Francis Young. Cambridge University Library MS Add. 3544, catalogued as ‘A Book of Magic’, has recently appeared in print for the […]

Manuscripts

Cambridge Digital Library – latest update

Posted on 7 September 2015 by Special Collections

This release includes an important addition to our Royal Commonwealth Society collection. Thomas Dalrymple’s extraordinary photographs of the the former British Cameroons (now Nigeria) in 1937-1942 give […]

Cambridge Digital Library, Lewis-Gibson Collection, Royal Commonwealth Society, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection

Cantabrigia Geographia: Cambridge in Maps 1574-1798

Posted on 1 September 2015 by Andrew

In the Map Room at Cambridge University Library it is possible to travel the world through both time and space from the comfort of a single […]

Maps

‘World’s loneliest white man’

Posted on 28 August 2015 by John C.

This was the headline of an American newspaper describing the British planter William French (1897-1960), who had greeted an American Museum of Natural History South […]

New on Janus, Photographs, Recent acquisitions, Royal Commonwealth Society

Board of Graduate Studies 1920-55

Posted on 6 August 2015 by Jacky Cox

A project is under way in the University Archives to sort, clean and list the early student files of the Board of Graduate Studies or […]

Archives, Cambridge University Archives, New on Janus

‘Plots upon the stage’: Restoration drama in the University Library

Posted on 3 August 2015 by Liam Sims

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 […]

Collectors and collecting, Exhibitions, Library history, Rare Books, Special Collections