Public benefactors and The John Rylands Library

The John Rylands Library

The most gorgeous library I discovered this year was The John Rylands Library in Manchester.

 It was hosting an exhibition I wanted to see.  So I planned my visit and went for the exhibition primarily.

However, once there, the building and collection is fascinating, so I found myself exploring the building and library top to bottom and wandering round the exhibition on the history of the Library.



Never got around to blogging about it at the time but meant to. 

So in seasonal end of year miscellaneous catch-up mode this seems very appropriate to talk about…  I enclose lots of photos and a few thoughts on what interested and amused me most about it.

A Gorgeous Space

It  is architecturally utterly gorgeous over several floors, it’s an odd mix of gothic cathedral in look, but without the religious symbolism much.  So lots of stone vaulted spaces, incredibly intricate design work in wood in the ceilings and tiny design detail, and gargoyles and other statues abound.





Working Library

It's still a working library (main reading room photos above) as well as being open to the public, and it was indeed designed to be modern in its time (using electricity, not gas for example, as that was thought to be better for the books). These days it hosts most of the Special Collections of the University of Manchester Library. Which is what brought me down to see an exhibition partially consisting of works from its papyrus collection.

Public Benefactor



Enriqueta Rylands, main reading room



Also, it's really unusual. 

It was commissioned by Enriqueta Rylands as a Memorial Library for the people of Manchester to use. It's dedicated to the memory of her late husband.

It opened in the Deansgate area of the city as an independent charity in what was then a hugely industrial Manchester.

Building Issues

In some ways the story of the Library is incredibly modern.  It took a week to design it (though the design changed continually throughout the building process), but it took ten years to build it and open it in 1900.  There’s something hilariously funny but rather wonderful in a way about a week to design (we’d take years) but ten years to build (somehow that chimes with the modern age somewhat closer to home!!). You can sense the frustration, problems, time and energy, the love and sheer money involved,  just in those two figures.



Element from exhibition text on the Library



Charitable Status

The John Rylands Library was an independent charity for a very long time.  It didn’t merge with the University of Manchester Library till the 1970s.

Purpose

The evolution of libraries, how they came into being, and when, due to what factors…  Always interesting.  I like the fact that this is a huge library commissioned for a purpose, and it’s still a working library now in a very different age, but it still fulfils the original purposes intended, and it still benefits the people of Manchester and beyond as well as the academic community it is now part of.

Worth a visit

There’s regular tours, so if you happen to have a few hours unaccounted for in Manchester, go in, and have a look round.  It’s a rather amazing place.  Plus, it's always nice to grin at a nice big ediface of a card catalogue in nostalgia mode!



Memories of the Browne system abound!