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Steer-Webster, Royal Engineers, was the Deputy Director of Experimental Engineering. This department was tasked with devising a means to land troops and supplies on the Normandy beaches less well defended than those with harbours. The result was two floating harbours, both similar in size to Dover Harbour, prefabricated in the dockyards of Britain, towed in sections across the Channel and constructed on the Normandy beachhead by Royal Engineers. Colonel Steer-Webster played a leading role in the design, development and trials of the Mulberry Harbour and was in almost daily contact with Sir Winston Churchill during its construction and development.

The collection of papers in this collection is of a particularly local nature, they are the papers of Thomas Verner Jr. (1796-1875). Verner was appointed as receiver of the distressed Donegall estate in 1847 by the Chancery Court and retained this role under the new Encumbrance Act. Verner was related to the third Marquis of Donegall and acted as his agent in Belfast. The Donegall estate which comprised significant amounts of land in counties Antrim and Donegal included the town of Belfast.

A beautifully annotated copy of Aesop’s fables which, quite probably, was used and read at the college nearly five hundred years ago. Foremost among the many reasons to celebrate the return to Queens’ of this volume is its status as testimony to the humanist spirit that flourished at the college during the Tudor era. As such it represents a formidable addition to the unique collection of humanist texts already held in Queens’ College’s Old Library

These letters are more interesting than they might appear at first glance, being written in a period when Edward Thomas’s income, from what he termed ‘hack writing’ was going down - in fact by about one third in a couple years. Whilst a ‘drop’ from £300 per annum to £200 does not seem significant, in today’s ‘money’ that is the equivalent of £10,000 per annum at a time when he was also trying to maintain and school a family with three children.

Jeremy Mitchell, Chair of the Edward Thomas Fellowship and a Trustee of Petersfield Museum, writes: Since 2017 an extensive and important collection (gifted by the family of the late Tim Wilton-Steer) of over 2,000 books and other items, including som

An internationally significant literary archive of the British-born expressionist artist Barrie Cooke (1931-2014), fisherman and friend of poets, and an associated collection of 150 images he made in response to their work. Cooke moved to Ireland in 1954, and the archive represents an extraordinary record of creative collaboration. Cooke cast a wry and often rapturous eye on his friends’ writing, producing some 150 charcoal drawings, monotypes, watercolours and lithographs of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney’s poetry over a span of 35 years.

Autograph letter to his sister, Ada, and postcards to his niece. Although Lawrence was a prolific letter writer and over 5,500 letters are published in the Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge University Press, 8 vols., 1979-2000), comparatively few letters and postcards to family members have survived. These have special significance because they provide valuable insights into relationships which are often invisible to, and overlooked by, critics and biographers who are more interested in his friendships with literary figures and publisher

Mark Dorrington, Keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections writes: The University of Nottingham is extremely grateful to the Friends of the National Libraries for support

Correspondence to and from Tankerville, relating to the Dashwood Affair. The correspondents are Lords Cartaret and Tankerville, William Pitt and Lord Clarendon. Clarendon had held the office of Postmaster General between 1763-1765 and was returned to office in 1786 following Tankerville’s dismissal. The letters cover the period June 1786-December 1786.

The splendid rent roll listed the rents received from properties in and around Hackness for the years 1622 to 1639 and was very clearly an escape from the archive of the Derwent family of Hackness. This archive, which has been held by the Record Office since 1946, includes an early rental for 1605 to 1622, and a long series of rentals from 1650 to 1839. The rental for sale partly filled a significant gap in the sequence and we are very grateful to FNL whose generosity allowed us to secure it and return it to the archive.