Loughborough Parish Library Exhibition – Old Rectory, Loughborough

3 August 2024

The Old Rectory Museum – former rectory for the Parish of Loughborough and once home to Rev. James Bickham and his Library of 700 books – is staging an exhibition this summer which sees reproductions of pages from some of those books on display in the town for the first time in many a year.

The exhibition is curated by Ursula Ackrill, the academic librarian responsible for cataloguing Bickham’s Library for University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections, where it is now housed.  

Though some of the books from the original collection have been lost, the exhibition showcases items from the remaining 540 volumes, supporting a modern understanding of the importance of those works with information about the literary, religious and scientific developments being shared in them at the time Bickham was rector. Also on display are historical artefacts which a clergyman of some standing of that period would have been familiar with day-to-day.

Alongside the exhibition itself, the Museum is staging a number of free creative workshops exploring early modern print culture and the symbolism of the classical imagery used in many of Bickham’s now rare collection of books.

The Loughborough Parish Library Exhibition runs on Saturdays at the Old Rectory Museum in Rectory Place until 31^st August 2024. Details of this and the free creative workshops can be found below.

Article compiled by Alison Mott with information sourced from the Lynne About Loughborough website and the Loughborough Archaeological and Historical Society (LAHS) Facebook Group.