Search FNL grants since 1931

This edition of Delightes is bound with another slim household recipe book, A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, which is anonymous but may also be one of Plat’s works--the two certainly were commonly bound together after this 1611 edition. Delightes was probably first published in 1600 and A Closet in 1602, and the two were repeatedly republished through the first three quarters of the seventeenth century. Both are now rare, with the earliest surviving edition of A Closet being that published in 1608.

This handwritten receipt by Thomas Gainsborough is for the sum of 15 guineas received for a half-length portrait (which was 50 x 40 inches canvas). The portrait, now lost, was painted during the period he was living in Ipswich in the 1750s.

Malcolm Elwin was born in 1903, the son of a Nottingham businessman.  He was privately educated (possibly on health grounds) and became a student at University College, Oxford, but seems to have left without a degree in order to embark on a literary career.  As that career progressed during the 1

an important collection of military diaries, memoirs and letters written by two generations of the Morant family from 1845 to 1919.

The family and estate archive of the Pendarves family had been held on deposit at Cornwall Record Office in Truro since November 1953.

An edition of the complete works of the Latin grammarian Priscian, whose writings were used as the basis for the teaching of Latin grammar until the fifteenth century and as a source for extracts from classical authors whose works have otherwise been lost. Edited by Benedictus Brognolus, the well-known Venetian editor of classical texts and teacher of grammar, rhetoric and philosophy, and printed in Venice by Filippo Pinzi in 1492, it is currently recorded in only four UK libraries. The book is bound in contemporary blind-stamped calf over wooden boards, utilising a series of tools which have long been attributed to a bookbinder, or possibly bookseller, active in Cambridge in the fifteenth century. The binder, referred to as W.G. after the monogram found on his most distinctive tool, was active in Cambridge between c.1478 and 1507, indicating that the Priscian was in use in Cambridge within fifteen years of its printing.

In February 1842, Charlotte and Emily Brontë became students at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels. For the next nine months they worked unrelentingly, producing a series of devoirs (homework essays) in response to instructions given by their tutor, Constantin Héger.

The last significant portion of material that remained in private hands relating to Henry Talbot, pioneer of photography.

a late autograph draft manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ celebrated poem 'Binsey Poplars'. The last known major Hopkins manuscript to have been in private hands, ‘Binsey Poplars’ was the most significant Hopkins item to have come to the market in over forty years. 

The bulk of the collection consists of letters written by William, Percy and Sydney Spencer, three of the brothers of Stanley Spencer, the artist, mostly written to their sister Florence Image (aunt of Pamela, to whom they ultimately descended).