Three libraries and one Marxist
This week, I visited Manchester to speak for Consumer Focus at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party Conference [my blog posting here]. I took the opportunity to see my step-mother who lives outside the city.
Now I love books and she is a former librarian, so she took me to no less than three Manchester libraries. The main one was Chetham’s Library which is located in a building constructed in 1421 and was founded in 1653, making it the oldest surviving public library in the English-speaking world. In the middle years of the 19th century, the library was used by Karl Marx during his visits to Salford businessman Friedrich Engels. We saw where Marx sat and looked at some of the books that he consulted.
The other libraries we called into were the John Rylands Library, which opened in 1900 and now has more than 4 million printed books and manuscripts, and the Portico Library, which opened in 1806 and has a wonderful Georgian glass and plaster dome.