00:00The Leeds Library is the oldest surviving subscription library in the UK.
00:06It's home to 150,000 books.
00:11Everywhere you turn, including the extra galleries which were built above just to house more books,
00:18there's books everywhere.
00:20It's a membership only library, but everyone is now welcome.
00:24This is a first edition of The Whale, which you'll know as Moby Dick.
00:28So this is originally in three volumes, and you can see that.
00:34And how rare are these books?
00:36These are, I couldn't give you a number, but they are very rare.
00:39First editions, yeah, there aren't many still around.
00:43As a library that's always bought what our members wanted, we buy books and we keep them,
00:49and that makes us unusual in that we never throw them away, we'll never get rid of them,
00:54so we have a lot of very rare books here, which is great.
00:56This is our oldest book, this is John de Mandeville's Travels to the Holy Land.
01:02This is from 1483.
01:04And how long have you been going far?
01:06So the library's found in 1768.
01:09It's the oldest subscription library still going in the UK.
01:12It predates the public libraries as well, so we're a real cultural institution in Leeds.
01:16When it started, it moved around a couple of times, and then we found its home here in 1808.
01:22It was built to be a library, and it's been a library ever since.
01:25So it's peaceful.
01:26It's extremely peaceful.
01:29People walk down Commercial Street and they don't see a library here, because they don't expect to see a library here,
01:34which makes us a bit of a hidden gem.
01:37A little bit too hidden sometimes, but we are a hidden gem.
01:40A lot of our staff has been working through a massive backlog of them down in our basement,
01:44and he recently finished it, and we think it's probably the most complete collection of Victorian fiction,
01:51trashy Victorian fiction of its kind, because everyone else threw it away.
01:54So we're really excited about it.
01:59That project's complete.
02:00There's a whole other project to come out of that, I think.
02:02Wow.
02:03Yeah.
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