Original manuscripts, drafts, letters, diaries and notebooks of Samuel Beckett (1906-89), and a large library of printed books related to him, collected by Professor Knowlson, Beckett's friend and authorised biographer.
Search FNL grants since 1931
Item date: 20th century
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £10,000 (Philip Larkin Fund)
Item cost: £337,000
Institution: Reading University Library
Town/City: Reading
County: Berkshire
Item date: 20th century
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £5,000 (Philip Larkin Fund)
Item cost: £10,000
Institution: Kingston University
Town/City: London
About 180 letters written over four decades by Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher to the writer and philosopher Denis Paul, her Oxford contemporary and lifelong friend.
Item date: 17th - 19th century
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £750
Item cost: £1,500
Institution: Plymouth and West Devon Record Office
Town/City: Plymouth
County: Devon
Maristow, seat of the Lords Roborough, was bought in 1798 by Manaesseh Masseh Lopez, only son of Mordecai Rodriguez Lopez, a Sephardic Jew who made a fortune in the sugar plantations.
Item date: 1807
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £3,000
Item cost: £24,500
Institution: Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Town/City: Oxford
County: Oxfordshire
The unique copy of a work by William Smith (1769-1839), the pre-eminent English geologist of his time, long believed lost.
Item date: 1660
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £500
Item cost: £2,500
Institution: Milton's Cottage Trust
Town/City: Chalfont St Giles
County: Buckinghamshire
The Royal Proclamation of 13 August 1660 requiring persons possessing the 'wicked and traitorous' books of John Milton and John Goodwin to deliver them to the county sheriffs to be publicly burnt by the hangman at the next assizes.
Item date: 12th century
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £4,680
Item cost: £31,200
Institution: Lambeth Palace Library
Town/City: London
Robert Pullen (d.1146) was an outstanding English churchman, one of the first recorded lecturers in the University of Oxford and the first English cardinal. Archbishop Bancroft bequeathed one of the three surviving MSS of his sermons to Lambeth Palace Library in 1610.
Item date: 19th century
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £7,500
Item cost: £45,000
Institution: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester
Town/City: Manchester
County: Lancashire
Correspondence and papers of the Green Family of Knutsford, Cheshire, including 16 letters from Elizabeth Gaskell to Mary Green. Her husband, Henry Green, was from 1827-72 Minister of Brook Street Unitarian Chapel, Knutsford, the town immortalised by Mrs Gaskell as 'Cranford'.
Item date: 1754
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £1,500
Item cost: £15,000
Institution: Hounslow Local Studies Service
Town/City: London
Hogarth wrote to John Kirby on 7 June 1754 advising him on handling a controversy about perspective, a subject on which Kirby, an artist, architect and topographical draughtsman, was an expert. Autograph letters of Hogarth are extremely rare.
Item date: 1786
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £2,800
Item cost: £2,800
Institution: RIBA Architectural Library
Town/City: London
(1) A portrait drawing of the Exeter builder-architect James Stowey, signed 'C[harles] Coffin Nepos delt. Exeter Sept.
Item date: 1934
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £570
Item cost: £570
Institution: Weiner Library
Town/City: London
A rare book by the journalist Michael Fry describing his experiences in Germany up to 1934. It contains an analysis of Nazism, the role of Hitler, and observations on 'The Jewish Question' and concentration camps.