Dennis Duncan

2 months ago | the-tls.co.uk | Dennis Duncan |Oliver Balch |Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Muireann Maguire

The John Rylands Library in central Manchester is both a national treasure and a national treasury. Housed in a church-like late-Victorian gothic building is one of the country’s largest collections of rare books and manuscripts outside Oxbridge and the British Library. Not just books and papers, but also objects – a lock of William Wordsworth’s hair, and of Marcel Proust’s, Mrs Gaskell’s sewing scissors, the lining of Walt Whitman’s hat.