When shelf life hits a century
An online exhibition is celebrating 100 years since the foundation of one of the most important and extensive compilations of rare books and manuscripts in the country. Laura Reid discovers more about the Brotherton Collection and the treasures on show for its centenary. Pictures by James Hardisty.
endowment, which is still used to purchase additions to the Brotherton Collection today.
One of the most recent acquisitions, and one that also features in the centenary exhibition, is a copy of the first folio of plays by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher from 1647, a personal copy once owned by Prince Charles, later Charles II of England. “That was bought with Brotherton legacy money,” Rhiannon explains. “The most significant copy of one of the most significant books of the 17th century.”
That folio joins many others in the Brotherton Collection, including all of William Shakespeare’s Four Folios, which Brotherton acquired in the four years after the 1922 auction.
Those, too, are on display in the online exhibition, which had its launch on Wednesday.
Other highlights include the sole surviving manuscript of composer Mendelssohn’s Sonata for piano in B flat minor, written when he was just 14; Branwell Brontë’s Letters from an Englishman; and 1969 manuscript poems written from solitary confinement by poet and playwright Wole
Soyinka, who was arrested and imprisoned for his opposition to the Federal Government of Nigeria.
The university will also be holding a series of talks, events and blogs exploring the collection’s
He was building up what he knew was a very impressive library which would be of national status
significance, as well as displaying key items in the Treasures of Brotherton Gallery.
“I think there are many things that Brotherton might not have foreseen that he would be very proud of,” Rhiannon reflects. “With such a significant collection coming to the university in the 1930s, other collectors then began to approach the library and donate their own collections… I wonder if the university library hadn’t already been established as a repository for such wonderful collections, they might not have thought to add to it.”
Across the university’s special collections, there are now some 300,000 print items and hundreds of thousands of archival materials and manuscripts.
“I think what Brotherton did was establish Leeds as a place where books and manuscripts would be looked after, used and given a life,” Rhiannon says.
“And the Brotherton Collection itself is still attracting local poets and major poets of the current generation,” Professor Brennan adds. “It’s still a living, vital organism.”
■ To see the online exhibition, visit spotlight. leeds.ac.uk/brotherton100
■ The Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery at the University of Leeds is free and open 10am-5pm, Tuesday to Saturday.