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The Collection 

Subject: History

While the City of ������Ƶ features especially strongly, all of ������Ƶ is included, with topics covering culture, economy, politics, society and topography. Books range from studies of single buildings to works on particular suburbs and more broadly on Greater ������Ƶ. Guidebooks and other descriptions of ������Ƶ and its environs are common. Other forms range from scholarly and popular monographs to broadsides, directories, pamphlets, newsbooks, proclamations, and about 200 prints and maps. There are about fifteen manuscripts, the most spectacular of which is a contemporary roll depicting the funeral procession of Anne of Cleves in 1557.

The seventeenth century is particularly well represented with around 1,250 items, including material on Lord Mayors’ pageants and a remarkable number of Civil War pamphlets, as well as items published in the immediate wake of the Gunpowder Plot, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of ������Ƶ of 1666. Some early-nineteenth-century imprints, such as those published by Rudolph Ackermann, are beautifully illustrated. From the eighteenth century onwards some fiction is present, notably George Reynolds’s sensational Mysteries of the Court of ������Ƶ. The collection also covers the early settlement of Australia. 

The material was collected by  (1876-1963), a co-founder of Gaumont Cinemas. The executors of his estate donated it to the ������Ƶ in 1964.