Search FNL grants since 1931

The Visitor Book of the Royal Bath Hotel, Bournemouth, which contains a treasure trove of signatures from the Victorian world including Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Merton and Annie Russell-Cotes, who founded the Museum, bought the Bath Hotel in 1876 and developed it as the Royal Bath Hotel to be one of the finest hotels in Britain, if not Europe, at the end of the 19th century. The rich and famous of the Victorian world beat a path to the hotel and the small and exclusive seaside resort of Bournemouth.

The Whitehouse Ruskin Collection. Bought with the aid of a grant of £35,000 from Friends of the National Libraries.

The Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture (RSA) has acquired this rare and significant Scottish anatomical volume with the support of the Friends of the National Libraries.

“Tracts Coal & Nursery” is a collection of papers and 18th century nursery catalogues.

The volume includes a collection of catalogues from plant nurseries in Scotland issued between 1765 and 1784 bound with two pamphlets from 1777 and 1784 on the qualities of coal tar and a copy of the 1765 Act for encouraging the Cultivation, and for the better Preservation of Trees, Roots, Plants, and Shrubs. Of the 16 nursery catalogues in the volume, 12 were not previously available in libraries in either Scotland or the rest of the UK and three were variations on copies in the existing RBGE collection.

Since 2017 an extensive and important collection of over 2,000 books and other items, including some letters, by and about the early 20th-century literary reviewer, writer and poet Edward Thomas, has been held at Petersfield Museum's Edward Thomas Study Centre, on loan from the Edward Thomas Fellowship. The opportunity to add this letter, with its local significance is a significant step forward for the Museum and the Edward Thomas Fellowship as both seek to further establish the Study Centre as an important resource for Thomas scholars and the wider public.

Hughes signed and dated this copy in September 1971, but retained it until 1980, when it became a Christmas present for his son and fishing companion Nicholas. It is the most intimate testimony to the passions they shared. As well as manuscript copies of its opening two printed poems, ‘An Otter’ and ‘Pike’, both from Lupercal (1960), it contains seven more fishing poems, none yet published.

This small archive relating to the literary estate of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). The acquisition now forms part of our DH Lawrence Collection, which was designated in 2008 by the former Museums, Libraries and Archives Council as being of national and international importance. It adds to our knowledge of the fraught relationship between Frieda and Lawrence’s siblings and the dispute over the rightful ownership of his manuscripts and the payment of royalties.

Thomas Pierce The sinner impleaded in his own court. Wherein are represented the great discouragements from sinning, which the sinner receiveth from sin it self.

The National Trust is very grateful to the Friends of the National Libraries for a grant that enabled us to repatriate this volume back to the shelves of Gunby Hall, Lincolnshire. Thomas Pierce’s The sinner impleaded, the first edition of which appeared in 1656, is a key text for outlining Pierce’s objection to Calvinist doctrine and his staunch support of episcopacy. Pierce’s various publications placed him at the centre of the religious controversy of the day but the present work is his most enduring effort, having gone through four editions by 1679.

A small, yet important group of literary papers relating to the poet, writer and soldier Edward Thomas (1878-1917). The items acquired were all once in the possession of Thomas’s friend, the Gloucester lawyer and bibliophile Jack Haines (1875-1960). The most significant and interesting item is a school exercise book once used by Myfanwy, Thomas’s daughter, which was reused by him to write his poetry. Although only eight leaves remain in the book, they contain multiple drafts, in his own hand, of two of his very earliest poems, ‘The Mountain Chapel’ and ‘Birds’ Nests’. They are dated 17 and 18 December respectively, only a few weeks after Thomas began writing poetry in earnest.

The unpublished letter, written in 1755, and the only known correspondence with Traill, concerns Hume’s recent reading of a sermon by Traill where he confronts Hume’s disparaging remarks about the Scottish clergy. Hume had previously criticised them in his 1748 essay ‘Of National Characters’ where he remarked that their need to ‘feign more devotion than they are… possessed of’ led them to ‘promote the spirit of superstition, by a continued grimace and hypocrisy’. Traill responded with his published sermon The Qualifications and Decorum of a Teacher of Christianity Considered (1755).