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One of the very first decisions made by the Mitchell Library trustees in 1874 was that the Library should seek to acquire all that it could about Glasgow, and about Robert Burns. The Robert Burns Collection is, therefore, fundamental to the Mitchell Library, and remains at the core of our current collecting policy. The acquisition of Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon adds considerable strength to the Mitchell Library’s existing holdings.

This first edition of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne is very finely bound by Robert Riviere with a fore-edge painting of The Plestor, the village square in Selborne, reproduced from one of the original illustrations for the first edition of The Natural History. The original illustrations were commissioned by Gilbert White himself from the Swiss painter Samuel Hieronymus Grimm. Fore-edge paintings are very rare and this edition will make a very valuable exhibition item. Robert Riviere was an English bookbinder of French descent, he was an accomplished craftsman and his styles and techniques have not often been surpassed.

In the 18th century genteel behaviour was a crucial concern of London’s middling sorts, whose homes and domestic lives the Geffrye Museum represents. Nivelon wrote to advise those 'who had rather be, and appear, easy, amiable, genteel and free in their person, mein, Air and motions, than stiff, awkward, deform’d, and, consequently, disagreeable’.

This copy of the The Compleat Gardener’s Practice, a 17th-century gardening book, was acquired from the library of the garden designer Rosemary Verey, and includes the yellow sticker she used to mark the knot design which inspired her own renowned garden at her home, Barnsley House. Stephen Blake’s The Compleat Gardener’s Practice is an important addition for the Garden Museum collection, because it illustrates the change in use and design of the garden during the seventeenth century. It is also invaluable to the study of twentieth- century garden design.

A splendid map of the environs of Newhaven, drawn by William Figg in 1824 measuring over 6 by 8 feet. The Figgs were the foremost Lewes surveyors of the day, and the office holds many of their maps and drawings, both worked-up products from the records of their clients, and the substantive business archive of the firm itself. This map, drawn at a scale of 100 feet to an inch, is a detailed survey of an extensive area from the mouth of the river Ouse upstream to the town.

A copy of Astesanus de Ast, Summa de Casibus Conscientiae, in a contemporary named binding by Johannes Meigfoge, active in Ellwangen or Tübingen (Baden-Württemberg) in 1475-1513. The binding contains two large ninth-century manuscript fragments as pastedowns, taken from a manuscript of Bede's In librum Genesim, making it one of the oldest witnesses to In Genesim. This book is a significant one and the acquisition of the manuscript fragments of In Genesim represents an important addition to Durham Cathedral Library.

The Fox family of Falmouth are unparalleled within Cornwall for the breadth of their commercial activities and personal interests. This collection documents the full range of the family’s activities and incorporates the surviving archives of their principal business, G. C. Fox and Company, from its foundation in 1762 to its eventual sale in 1999. Over time this firm held interests in shipping, mining, engineering, fishing, signals and travel agency. Its partners acted in a consular capacity for countries throughout the Europe and the Americas.

An early post-incunable in a remarkable early sixteenth-century binding by a named binder. This 1515 edition of the anonymous Vocabularius utriusque iuris reprints one of the most popular legal dictionaries of the early modern period. Many of the 16th-century editions are now very rare; this edition is known in just three other copies.

The Opera Hrosvite illustris virginis were edited by Conrad Celtes from the sole surviving manuscript known at the time, and printed in Nuremberg under the first book publishing privileges granted to cover the whole Holy Roman Empire. Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim was born in the 930s and lived in Gandersheim Abbey in Saxony. This is considered to be the first example of a work published under a privilege covering the Holy Roman Empire. As well as the highly important literary content, the volume includes eight woodcuts, two by Albrecht Dürer.

The Codex Zacynthius is a named codex of the New Testament, consisting of 176 parchment leaves in a 16th-century goatskin binding. The Codex is a palimpsest, with a catena (commentary) on the Gospel of Luke, containing substantial parts of the book, overwritten by a selection of the Gospels in Greek, an evangeliary, in the 12th century. The importance of the manuscript lies in the undertext, the catena, which is most likely to be dated to c. 700 CE