History of the Town Library
the manifold fecundity of Victorian society that its shelves themselves suggest.
Many sources are still being added to the local collection, partly because the library itself acts as a magnet. Many of the acquisitions are too diverse to be easily summarised (something everywhere evident in the library). Among some particularly fine recent gifts, however, are five scrap books compiled and copiously annotated by the late H. C. Stacey, historian of the Borough and for many years the Town Clerk, and the David Campbell collection of over 4,000 photographs taken between the 1940s and 1970. The library has also acquired microfilms of the Saffron Walden Weekly News from its beginning in 1889, of many poor law archives for the town and its hinterland, and of the Census Enumerators' Books for every census from 1841 to 1901. In these matters the Town Library has drawn on the resources of the County Record Office in Chelmsford, and is at present debating ways in which other sources for north-west Essex might be made available locally through microforms, or digitisation.
Perhaps it may be said once more that the Town Library is a resource for far more than north-west Essex. It has about 5,000 works on biography and genealogy and
history elsewhere, including as it happens several hundred to interest local historians outside Essex, with many rare county histories. An especially valuable series comprises 30 volumes containing views of many hundreds of English churches, compiled about 1880 by WW Saunders, and including photographs as well as engravings; they are often consulted by architectural historians since they illustrate features obliterated by later reconstructions. A particularly varied collection of London material has also been gathered, containing a grangerised copy of John Stow's Survey (1720 edition), Thomas Shotter Boys, Original Views (1842), and an almost complete unbound set of the Newgate Calendar in near-pristine paper covers.
There are also complete sets of the Gentleman's Magazine, the Annual Register, and Notes and Queries, and numerous standard nineteenth-century histories of many areas of the world, so that (for example) a scholar investigating Victorian attitudes towards Greece and Rome might study with profit in Saffron Walden for many weeks. From a quite different epoch, Abiezer Coppe, Copp's return to the wayes of Truth: in a zealous and sincere Protestation Against Severall Errors (1651) is one of many Stuart tracts in the library. Coppe, a
