This collection comprises a small amount of papers of and relating to William Lisle Blenkinsopp Coulson (1841-1911), army officer and campaigner for animal rights. It includes correspondence, published material relating to Blenkinsopp Coulson, and a number of family items namely a General Pardon granted by Edward IV, an Eighteenth Century recipe book and collections of stamps and postcards.

Consists of letters and proofs relating to published works by Bloodaxe Books. Also contains documents relating to the marketing, finance and management of the company.

Bloodaxe Books authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, including the T.S. Elliot Prize, Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize. Bloodaxe is also known for its work with translated collections and American poetry, and have published responsively to cultural change in Britain, publishing some of the finest writers in the British-Caribbean and South-Asian diaspora. Another significant achievement is that Bloodaxe publish more female writers than any other British poetry publisher, at a 50:50 male:female ratio. This collection consists of the books published by Bloodaxe Books including poetry and prose.

The Bosanquet Papers consist of archive material relating to Bernard Bosanquet, the idealist philosopher (1848-1923), and to his wife, Helen Bosanquet, née Dendy (1860-1926), a member of the 1909 Poor Law Commission. Material relating to Bernard Bosanquet comprises correspondence, research notes, drafts and manuscripts of publications, as well as offprints from journals and other publications by Bosanquet himself.Material relating to Helen Bosanquet includes notes and correspondence for her memoir of Bernard Bosanquet, offprints from publications, correspondence relating to Helen Bosanquet's family and relating to public work, journals of travel, drawings, literary notebooks, photographs, engagement diaries and some undated miscellaneous material. A particular highlight is Helen Bosanquet's notebook which contains diary notes on Poor Law Commission meetings attended by her in 1909.

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 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).

Consists of fifteen diaries of William Brewis of Mitford, and two items of contemporary published material relating to the diaries.

There is one diary for every year between January 1833 and January 1850, aside from 1835, 1836 and 1844. These provide a first-hand account of rural life in the Morpeth and Ponteland districts, as Brewis describes visits to hiring fairs and markets, current sale prices for crops and animals, and farms available to rent. He also regularly observes weather conditions, which were unusually severe between 1837 and 1855 due to the advance of Icelandic glaciers, and their effect on the growing seasons and harvests. Brewis remarks on how his farm is affected by a ‘distemper’ amongst the livestock, similar in nature to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, as well as his own illness during the outbreak of influenza in 1837.

Brewis documents dining with leading members of the community and gives an insight into the relationships between farmers, local landowners and businesses in the area. His diaries make note of events in the local community including the execution of Ralph Joyce, a 24 year old man charged with the murder of his own father who was hung in Morpeth gaol in 1846.

Like many other farmers of the time, Brewis took a keen interest in national and international news. In his diaries he notes and makes frequent comments on national political and societal events. These include the death of King William IV, whom Brewis was fond of, and the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whom Brewis often criticised. There are also entries on Chartism and the Chartist rising in Newport led by John Frost, as well as notes on India and the war against the Sikhs in April 1846.

Manuscript transcripts of radio communications created by members of the British North Greenland Expedition (BNGE) while in Greenland. The messages cover communication between individual expedition members, units of the expedition, and external parties such as American and Danish military bases and the expedition's main external point of contact and control which was referred to as Pakice and located in London.

The expedition took place over two phases between 1952 and 1954 and undertook a range of work on the North Greenland Icecap including glaciology, seismology, geology, gravitometry, radio wave observations, and mapping of the ice sheet. The expedition also provided an important test bed for British polar research capabilities more broadly, including logistics, communication and medicine. Members of the expedition team were predominantly members of the military, but it included several members who would later have notable careers in academia and research, including Hal Lister, James Simpson, Stan Paterson and Peter Wyllie.

The communication include reports of progress and scientific measurements, discussions regarding expedition plans, records of incidents and their resolution, and communications between expedition members and family.

Transcripts cover most of the period of the expedition, and include messages sent and received. However, the archive is not a full and complete set of transcripts. There are no transcripts in the archive covering the first 2 months of the expedition, nor for between January and April 1953.

19th Century printed ephemera, much of which originates from North East England.

The Burman-Alnwick Collection was brought together by Dr. C.C. Burman and presented to Alnwick U.D.C. by his son, Joseph Burman, to later be deposited in the Library on long-term loan.It consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides and other material printed in Alnwick 1700-1917 and is chiefly a local history collection, containing such items as An address to 'the four and twenty' of the borough of Alnwick: on certain improvements in the plan of education, pursued in the borough school [1839], The Alnwick Mercury, Northumberland Advertiser, and entertaining miscellany (1854-1859), The Journal of the Northumberland Agricultural Society (1850) and the Alnwick Mechanics' Institute's Annual Report [18--]. It is also something of a literary collection, containing Alnwick printings of well-known tales such as The babes in the wood [18--] and The ballad of Chevy Chase (1800) as well as children's literature and educational tools like The child's battledore [c.1830], works by James Beattie and Thomas Percy and various chapbooks and ballads. Published sermons and letters also appear.