Please join us at Manchester’s magnificent John Rylands Library for an in-person event to mark the publication of Library Lives: A Constellation of Books and Objects from the Rylands by Stella Halkyard.

Admission is free, but booking is essential as places are limited. Copies of Library Lives will be available to buy at the event.

Please reserve your free tickets here https://buytickets.at/carcanetpress/1356346

Library Lives plots Stella Halkyard’s lifelong love affair with the John Rylands Library in Manchester and its collections. Drawn from every corner and period of the textual and meta-textual world, this book tells the life stories of some of a great library’s previously unsung bijouterie. Through a sequence of idiosyncratic and often playful short essays Halkyard celebrates the resonance of objects and their ability to tell stories across time and place.

The event will include a tour of the library led by Stella Halkyard and the opportunity to see some of the items featured in the book. Chosen especially for their Mancunian associations the objects showcased will include a rich assortment of gems from Carcanet’s archives, Elizabeth Gaskell’s accoutrements, Isabella Banks’s craftwork, the Manchester Butterfly’s Proustian keepsakes, and a superb series of portraits from the Rylands’ own Portrait of a Living Archive project by photographers Gwen Riley Jones and Jamie Robinson.

Stella Halkyard studied English at the University of Newcastle, History of Art at the University of Manchester, and Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool. She was the Joint Head of Special Collections at the Rylands where she curated its Modern Literary Archives, Art, Photography and Object Collections for many years. Her research interests include the material cultures of literature and art and the history of photography.