The Napoleon Collection contains books written in French as well as English language materials, published in the Twentieth Century with the exception of three nineteenth-century items. The books relate to Napoleon (1769-1821), the Napoleonic Wars and to the French empire and include 'notes and reminiscences' as well as histories.

This is a collection of over 2000 volumes and hundreds of pamphlets, covering the history of medicine and a broad range of medical subjects. The collection is rich in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century works.

It includes books from the medical library of noted South Shields doctor T.M. Winterbottom (1766-1859), and highlights include Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia (1794), John Abercrombie's Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord (1828), considered to have been the first textbook on Neuropathology, and several works by the famed botanist, humanist and physician Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738).

This small collection comprises books which were produced in the infancy of the art of printing, and specifically before 1500. The collection includes such works as the Epistolae of St. Jerome, printed in Palma in 1480, Opus de peste, a tract on plague printed in Bologna in 1478, and the first printed book on architecture, Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria (1485).

The Entomology Collection currently contains books on insects which were published between the late-Eighteenth and mid-Nineteenth Centuries, some of which have hand-coloured illustrations. The books are written in English, French or German, for the most part, with some in Latin.

The Bradshaw-Bewick Collection contains works by and relating to the engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). Bewick was born at Cherryburn, near Mickley, Northumberland and his early interest in drawing, under the tuition of the Reverend C. Gregson, was later developed when he was apprenticed under the Newcastle engraver, Ralph Beilby. He was to become a master craftsman.Bewick had a particular fascination with the natural world and this is reflected in works such as A general history of quadrupeds (1790) and History of British birds (1797). The collection is strong in Bewick's other main area of interest - morals and fables. His Select fables (1784) was immediately popular and ran into several editions but he worked on many small moral instruction books, such as Youth's instructive and entertaining story-teller (1778) and The looking-glass for the mind (1792).

The Bradshaw Collection contains books published 1601-1700 and is notable for its English Revolution, or Civil War, tracts, of which there are about sixty mostly describing local events, such as The Taking of Gateshead Hill: and blocking up of Newcastle … (1644), A Terrible and bloudy fight at Tinmouth Castle on Fryday last … (1648) and The King's declaration at Newcastle concerning his refusall to come to the parliament of England … (1647). Some of these are illustrated, often with wood-cut portraits.Other subjects represented in the collection include theology and some literature. Classical works, in Latin and Greek, by such authors as Catullus, Pliny, Virgil and Juvenal; Aristophanes, Dionysius and Euripides make up a large portion of the collection. The collection also has volume I of Edmund Gibson's English translation of William Camden's Britannia (1695), the first (Latin) edition of which had been the first comprehensive study of Britain.

The 21st Century Collection is newly-established but, as it expands, will contain books on miscellaneous subjects from varied sources which were published 2000-2099. Currently, these books are likely to be issued by private presses, in limited print-runs, relate to other collections in Special Collections, have interesting or significant provenance, or be particularly valuable due to them being fine or extra-illustrated copies. One example is Bajac, Q. L'image révélée: l'invention de la photoggraphie (2001) which reproduces a Lerebours daguerreotype, Port Ripetta, à Rome, from our holdings on page 112.

This is a collection of approximately 600 pamphlets and short publications on world affairs in the Twentieth Century. Many themes are covered, including politics, economics, civil liberty, democracy and religion, and many of the countries of the world feature. Examples of titles in the collection are Full employment in a free society; I was a Franco Soldier; The hydrogen bomb and you; What the Arab World really wants; The Basques and the Communists; British policy in the Far East; Two Sides in Germany: Which is yours?; Youth and Anti-Semitism; Haile Salassie: the Plea for Ethiopia; Japanese Naval expansion; Chinese Women and the War; and Banking in Soviet Russia. Many prominent figures are represented as authors, including Marx and Engels, Kropotkin and Liu Shao-Chi.

The 20th Century Collection, because it contains books which were published 1900-1999, is multi-disciplinary in its subject coverage. Literature is represented in the works of such authors as Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Jon Silkin and Robert Graves. There is local history, in the form of Jackson, G. The Boer War and the Liberal Party in Newcastle and Gateshead (1998); Willis, P. Capability Brown in Northumberland (1983) and Pawson, H.C. Cockle Park Farm: an account of the work of the Cockle Park Experimental Station from 1896-1956 (1960). Whilst there are some items relating to World War I, there is a significant amount of material relating to World War II - published 1939-1943, often by Penguin (or the Pelican imprint) in the iconic early paperback series. This material includes E.O. Lorimer's What Hitler Wants [1939] - a Penguin Special which achieved record-breaking sales, as well as F. Lafitte, The internment of aliens (1940) and Glover, E. The psychology of fear and courage (1940).