Contains of 2 albums of letters, including some by people of local significance like Thomas Bewick, Richard Grainger, George Stephenson, George Otto Trevelyan, Robert Spence Watson and Joseph Swan and others written by such household names as A.E. Houseman, Horatio Nelson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, William Wilberforce, Michael Faraday, William Ewart Gladstone, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Besant, Mary Shelley, Charles Babington, Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, Ellen Terry and Robert Southey. Other letters include a request for an address to facilitate the delivery of a bear skin from David Walton (1859), an account of the pranks of the 'Borrowlow Bogle' from J. Arkle (1856), the refusal to grant Madame de Bury's request that an officer in the Indian Army be promoted by Richard Airey (1860), a description of his house in China by James Bruce Elgin (1860) and a discussion of French politics and her newly-married life in the country by Frances [i.e. Fanny] Burney (1792).

L.T. Meade (1854-1914) was the Irish daughter of a Protestant clergyman who later moved to London. She contributed short stories and articles to magazines such as The Strand Magazine and edited the periodical Atlanta but became better-known for her novels. She tried her hand at several genres, including crime fiction, but is most closely associated with stories which targeted a female audience, notably stories about girls' schools.

Meade wrote approximately 250 books and we have about 180 in our holdings which were published from 1878 and as recently as 2003. Titles include: The autocrat of the nursery, The children of Wilton Chase, Kitty O'Donovan, and The Scamp family. The collection was gifted to the Library by Jean Garriock.

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).

The Merz Collection is the mathematical library of John Theodore Merz (1840-1922), an electrical engineer. Merz also had an interest in philosophy, and the collection also includes books amassed by him during the writing of his work The History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century. These 4000 volumes are strongest in Mathematics and the History of European Thought, but also include notable works on science, European history and German Literature.A particular highlight is An investigation of the laws of thought: on which are founded the mathematical theories of logic and probabilities (1854) by George Boole, the English mathematician and philosopher, and inventor of Boolean logic, the basis of modern digital computer logic.The collection is also of interest for its book-bindings: mostly leather or half-leather bindings by Zaehnsdorf of London.

The Miscellaneous Manuscripts include some local history material, particularly relating to nineteenth-century bonds and deeds and to the coal trade as well as A collection of recipes, compiled in the years 1684-5; agriculturalist Robert Bakewell's Letters to George Culley, 1786-1792; eighteenth-century household account books; manuscript letters from Henry Liddell on the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion; early twentieth-century National Service League memoranda; An alphabetical list of members of the Northumberland Militia enrolled between 1809 and 1813, giving their full names, places of residence, trades, ages, dates of enrolment, and parishes for which installed; a fair copy of poems by Mary Coleridge, bound in vellum, which she made for a friend in 1891 and which was later published as Fancy's Following; worksheets, correspondence, typescripts and a postcard relating to Tony Harrison's Newcastle is Peru and letters from Sean O'Casey to the People's Theatre, Newcastle.