Collected by Edwin Clarke (1919-1996), the Clarke General Collection is a run of cuttings, illustrations, manuscripts and historic documents which are organised into two sequences: a subject sequence and a biographical sequence.Subjects range from the weather, food and actors, to Victorian 'freakshow' acts whilst items in the biographical sequence include silk in red, white and blue with a note asserting them to be

Bequeathed by Edwin Clarke (1919-1996), approximately half of the Clarke Miscellaneous Collection was published in the Twentieth Century but the collection contains material dating back to 1655. It is a collection with a strong bias towards the occult, ritual and folklore, with some rogue items relating to book history.

Examples include A laconic narrative on the life & death of James Wilson, known by the name of Daft Jamie (1881) - a victim of Burke and Hare -, F. Hutchinson's An historical essay concerning witchcraft (1718), The Yorkshire spiritual telegraph and British harmonial advocate (1857) and a book on exercise by H. Halsted called Motion-life: or the demon of the age and means of its exorcism (1856).