History of the Town Library
Ranter, was alleged 'to preach stark-naked many blasphemes and unheard of villaines', and was imprisoned for eighteen months under the Blasphemy Ordinances. Another surprising find is Isaac Newton's Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms (1728), a result of the great mathematician's obsession with calendrical matters, while there is also a virtually complete run of catalogues of the 1851 Great Exhibition. The value of books is naturally enhanced by journals that keep scholars abreast of current debate, and historians - especially if concerned with Victorian society or literature - will find on the shelves the leading British and American examples.
Many current art journals are also taken, as are all the exhibition catalogues that the librarians hear about. Art and architecture are fields where recent purchases outnumber Victorian acquisitions, although one hastens to add that these include books that are hard to come by in most libraries. One is by the Cambridge don, William Whewell, Architectural Notes on German Churches (1835), the first British work of any note on German Gothic. Neatly complementing it is Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire Raisonne de l'Architecture Francaise (1873), in praise of Gothic from an enthusiast called by
Nikolaus Pevsner 'the Gilbert Scott of France'. Its presence in the Town Library is further proof of the breadth of Walden's interests, and perhaps more specifically of Stacey Gibson's interests a century ago.
We can be certain that the 4,000 Victorian novels, many in first editions and some very unusual, all showing signs of hard reading, and the several hundred books of
