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Within almost a stone’s throw of the Manchester Royal Exchange there is housed one of the most glorious collections of written matter in the whole world. Writing of the late Rylands’s gift to the city, an Austrian scholar (and he wrote during the war) declared that “this library has in twenty years taken rank with such world-famed libraries as the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Vatican, and the Royal Libraries of Vienna and Munich, which have at least a century of development behind them.” In commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Rylands, its librarian, Mr. Henry Guppy, has just told its story in a fascinating and beautifully produced and illuminated monograph.
The foundress, Enriqueta Augusta Rylands, was the widow of a very typical Lancashire man who born at St. Helens and beginning in a comparatively small way at Wigan, became in the course of his long life, which coincided almost with the nineteenth century, one of the merchant princes of Manchester. Soon after his death Mrs Rylands was busy with her plans for the library, and these were given a unique stimulus when in the early nineties she acquired the Althorp collection of 40,000 books, which was in danger of crossing the Atlantic.
This, the fruits of forty years’ study of the salerooms of Europe, had been brought together by the second Earl Spencer, a nobleman who flourished at the end of the eighteenth century and into the early years of the nineteenth. A French scholar once described this collection as “the most beautiful and richest private library in Europe.” Its richness lies peculiarly in early printed books, and of these the Rylands possesses 3,000 produced earlier than 1501. A collection of Western and Oriental manuscripts, about as important in its field as the Althorp in the field of printing, was acquired by the foundress from the Earl of Crawford. Here was the nucleus of a library that any capital city might be proud of. But it is only the nucleus of the Rylands to-day.
Being well endowed, those responsible never cease adding as new books come out or old ones come on to the market. There are now 300,000 printed books and 10,000 manuscripts gathered together in Deansgate. There are Caxtons and Aldines; manuscripts in all great languages, besides others in Mongolian and Mexican, Tibetan and Javanese; there is the Bible from which Mr. Gladstone read the lessons at Hawarden and the manuscript copy of Wiclif’s gospel presented to Queen Elizabeth in Cheapside; there are the first printed editions of the 50 principal Greek and Latin authors; there are metal and ivory and jewel bound volumes; an early Missal of the Sarum Use is there, and Fenian tales in Irish, and the original manuscript of “From Greenland’s icy mountains.”
Scholars and specialists in almost all fields of learning look upon Deansgate as one of their most sacred Meccas: For those of them unable to make the pilgrimage but anxious to consult some of its treasures, there is a highly technical photographic department where texts are reproduced and then sent out. Ordinary students – as anyone who looks in especially during the University term-time may see – find Rylands invaluable. Its accommodation – so often a weakness in libraries – is excellent and its system of indexing simple. It has a periodical room in which are kept 500 learned magazines.
As Mr. Guppy says: “It is comparatively rare to find a rich person whose imagination transcends the ordinary ideal, and who is prepared to give to the community not so much what it wants as what it needs.” Mrs Rylands was very eminently one of these rare persons. She did her work thoroughly. For besides founding a great library she arranged that a fine architect, Basil Champneys, should build a home for it. So outside as well as within her gift has brought honour to Manchester. On October 6 its 25th anniversary will be celebrated.
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