History of the Town Library
Its other natural history treasures include Moses Harris, The Aurelian, a Natural History of English Moths and Butterflies, in the fourth edition of 1840; it is illustrated with 44 hand-coloured plates. An even finer work is John Blackwall, A History of the Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland (1861). The paper on which this book was printed seems to contain impurities; at all events, many copies are foxed, and so the Town Library is fortunate in possessing one of the very rare clean copies.
Gibson was a keen and discriminating bibliophile, and most of the greatest treasures the library possesses came in the bequest of 4,000 volumes (though somewhat fewer separate works) at his death in 1883 and 3,000 more given by his family in 1922: for example Jerome's Vulgate, a 1490 edition of Ptolemy's Cosmography, a first edition of Camden's Britannia, and a set of Cities of the World, by Braun and Hogenberg (Cologne, 1574-1616). Gibson was also fascinated by printing techniques, and the Town Library has inherited his small but significant collection on the subject, including The Art Exemplar: A Guide for Distinguishing one Species of Print from Another (c.1860); only a dozen copies were printed of this lavishly illustrated work.
Also valuable for bibliographers are the bills and correspondence of Dawson Turner (1775-1858), the book-collector, which are among the relatively few manuscripts not concerned with local history that the library possesses. To house these munificent gifts Gibson's widow, in fulfilment of his wishes, paid for the extension of the library building in the 1880s and, the family owning the freehold, presented it to the trustees.
