Special collections

The Wing Collection at Leeds Central Library comprises over 800 items printed between 1640 and 1700, mostly Tracts documenting the events, politics, religious debates and social life throughout the turbulent period of the English Civil Wars. 

Born in Adel, Leeds, Eric Rucker Eddison (1882-1945) became a leading civil servant and a writer of fantasy novels, most notably The Worm Ouroboros and The Zimiamvian Trilogy. In the 1960s Eddison’s wife, Winifred, bequeathed many of his original manuscripts and notes to the Leeds Central Library. 

The manuscript volumes known as the Leeds Pottery Drawing Books were compiled and used in the Leeds factory as a guide and record of the products. They contain pen and ink drawings of high quality and where enamelled products are recorded they are in water-colour. The books date from 1778 to 1779. Of the twelve known drawing books, nine are owned by Leeds Libraries and Information Services and the other three are in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Pattern Books, dated between 1783 and 1814, form the printed trade catalogue of the factory. They contain a series of engraved plates of designs selected from the Drawing Books issued with a key, or index, in several languages. 

Alice Cliff Scatcherd (1842-1906) was a lifelong campaigner for women’s rights who lived much of her life in Morley. She was secretary for the Leeds branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS) and one of the founding members and treasurer of the Women’s Franchise League. Her scrapbook  comprises letters, photos and letterpress relating to the national suffrage campaign, politics, education and Morley civic life. The rest of the collection includes Scatcherd family records, portraits and papers collected by Norrison Scatcherd.  
View scrapbook  
 

The Arthington Trust Collection consists of approximately 1000 early twentieth century missionary reports, pamphlets, magazines and books. Much of the material is by or about the Baptist Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society and was originally collected by Robert Arthington, born in Leeds in 1823. The Arthington family had made money in the brewery trade and Robert became a wealthy man on the death of his father. He developed a keen interest in missionary work and set up the Arthington Trust to administer money to the above named missionary societies. The collection was donated to Central Library in 1956. 

A collection of material relating to the temperance movement.  

The Horae beatae Mariae Virginis, or Book of Hours, was given to the library in 1929 by Beryl Gott, who also bequeathed the botanical collection that bears her family name. This illuminated manuscript was probably produced in Paris c. 1480.

The Leeds copy of Saxton’s Atlas was acquired for the library in 1951. 

Often referred to as the ‘father of English cartography’, little is known about the personal life of Christopher Saxton. He was probably born in the Yorkshire parish of Dewsbury in the early 1540s. Later his family moved to Dunningley between Morley and Middleton in the South Leeds area. He began his survey of England in 1574 and of Wales in 1577. The first copper plates were engraved in 1574 and the atlas was completed in 1578. The atlas contains 35 hand coloured maps of the counties of England and Wales.

Leeds Central Library acquired the Cistercian Missal from an auction at Sotheby's in December 1901 for the sum of £5. 

At over 500 years old the book has an extraordinary history. According to Thomas Wilson the book had ‘probably been preserved by William Cooke of Beeston when Kirkstall Abbey was dissolved’. The known provenance of the Missal suggests that it is highly likely that the book was used by the Cistercian monks of Kirkstall Abbey.

The library possesses a very rare complete edition of Animal Locomotion. It consists of eleven large folio volumes with a full set of 781 plates, over 20,000 images in total. The work was published exclusively by subscription at a price of one hundred dollars for each copy. One hundred plates constituted a copy of the work. Subscribers chose their selection from the 781 plates available in the prospectus and catalogue. As a result, the sets differ depending on the interests of the individual subscribers. 

An album of more than ninety photographs taken during the Antarctic expedition by the ship 'Morning' acting as a relief ship to Captain Scott's 1901-4 Discovery expedition. The Morning made two voyages to the Antarctic, on the second it returned with the whaling ship the ‘Terra Nova’ with orders to rescue Discovery which had been trapped in the ice.

Often described as "the most sumptuous and costly of the British bird books" (Mullens & Swann), our first edition set has five volumes which contain 376 coloured plates. The work was issued in 25 parts and Gould's illustrations were all painstakingly coloured by hand.  

Leeds Libraries also has Goulds’ six volume set; A monograph of the Trochilidæ, or family of humming-birds, published 1861-1887.