The Lit & Phil, Newcastle

Newcastle’s Lit and Phil, the largest independent library outside London, used to be very particular about its books. A high-minded 1842 committee warned against pandering “to a corrupt desire for trashy works”, so Scott’s Waverley novels were banned, and Dickens, George Eliot and Thackeray admitted only in 1891.

Even then, a member sneered at such novels and “those unfortunate enough to read them”. Tastes have broadened at this delightful subscription library, stocked with 150,000 books (1,000 new ones each year). Step through the pillared entrance and climb the staircase, past busts, urns and plaques, and into the main room, little changed since 1825, with three glass domes, high gallery and clubby atmosphere.

The Literary and Philosophical Society began as a “conversation club” and some of the present 1,600 members are carrying on that tradition over in the far corner, sipping coffee and nibbling Madeira cake over a new local history pamphlet. On the racks are The Times and its rivals, but also the Daily Jang (in Urdu) and newspapers in Bengali, Arabic and Chinese.

In her office, the librarian, Kay Easson, sits beside a shelf where Roy Keane’s autobiography (“a donation”) is sandwiched between John Updike and The Guiana Travels of Robert Schomburgh from 1835-44. “We’re not snooty,” she says. “People are welcome to bring their sandwiches and read.” Only subscribers can borrow books.

The lecture theatre, now demolished, was the first public room in the world lit by electric light. “It was so full for one lecture that the lecturer had to climb in through the window,” Easson says. “This isn’t like your average public library. There aren’t banks of computers, but we’re trying to respond to contemporary culture. We have wi-fi for members.”

23 Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne. 0191 232 0192, www.litandphil.org.uk

The Bar Convent, York

Sister Gregory reaches down Young Ladies’ Bills, a thin accounts book, and turns to page 277. In faded ink, it lists the expenses of Mary Clifton, a boarder at the school run by York’s Bar Convent in the 1760s.

“This single page is the story of her last few months,” Sister Gregory (right), the alert 96-year-old in charge of the convent library and archives, says. “She was just an ordinary, healthy child at first, with ruffles and a scarlet cloak that cost a guinea. But halfway down the page, she has an attendant and ‘a fire in her bedchamber;. Then an apothecary, a doctor and surgeon. Then a coffin and candles. Then ‘wine and biscuits at the funeral’.”

The Bar Convent is an elegant Georgian building housing five nuns from the order of the Congregation of Jesus. It has gone into the bed-and-breakfast, café and conference market, so there is a lively atmosphere on the ground floor.

Up steep stairs is the library, used by students and researchers, its peace disturbed only by a ticking clock. Some 4,000 volumes, many leather-bound, specialise in religious history and literature, with the saints arranged alphabetically from Aloysius to Vincent de Paul. The oldest is a 1508 edition of St Bernard, with spindly fingers in the margins pointing to important passages.

“Here’s a little Greek Gospels from the 18th century,” Sister Gregory says. “It was so well used that it fell to pieces and was rebound with a pair of ladies’ kid gloves. You can see the fingers and the seams and the stitches.” The archives include a 1739 accounts book listing a payment for 40 gallons of ale. Ale? In a convent?

“Well, yes,” says Sister Gregory. “They couldn’t drink the water, tea was terribly expensive and they only had one cow. What else could the nuns have drunk?”

17 Blossom Street, York. 01904 643238, www.bar-convent.org.uk

The John Rylands Library, Manchester

With its stained glass windows, Gothic arches and grinning gargoyles, the John Rylands Library, in the centre of Manchester, could easily be mistaken for a church.

“We’ve had people falling to their knees in the old entrance hall and praying,” John Hodgson, the keeper of manuscripts and archives, says. “But I suppose this is a temple of learning.”

The Historic Reading Room is a great cathedral nave of books with vaulted roof and pillars topped by statues of such secular saints as Shakespeare, Milton, Homer and Goethe. The library, part of Manchester University but open to the public, was built in the 1890s by Enriqueta Rylands as a memorial to her husband, the city’s most successful cotton tycoon.

“It could be quite intimidating,” Dawn Yates, head of visitor services, says. “You had to be quite brave to push the old heavy doors open.” No longer. The library reopened in May. Visitors now enter through an airy new reception, with café and shop: a fine contrast to the dim, cloistered corridors. “Very Harry Potter, isn’t it?” Yates says.

A new exhibition showcases a collection that fills ten miles of shelving, and features the St John Fragment, a three-inch-long piece of papyrus that is the oldest known part of the New Testament.

More recent treasures include Caxton’s first edition of The Canterbury Tales, the first serialisation of Bleak House in 19 instalments, and a superb edition of Edward Young’s 1740s poem Night Thoughts, illustrated by William Blake. It also has the archives of the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners of Lancashire and Cheshire, Mrs Gaskell’s paperknife and John Wesley’s preaching bands, a sort of early dog collar.

150 Deansgate, Manchester. 0161 306 0555, manchester.ac.uk/library

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