A library is keen for people to come and see a century-old lost treasure it discovered during lockdown – but do think about bringing a magnifying glass.
“Or really strong glasses,” said Rhian Isaac, special collections senior librarian at the Leeds Central library, talking about an 876-page Bible with Old and New Testaments which is less than 5cm in size. “It just looks like small squiggles, it really is tiny.”
The Bible dates from 1911 and is a replica of a chained Bible that people might find in a cathedral – chained so people didn’t make off with it. “It was a novelty really, it wouldn’t have been an expensive thing,” said Isaac. “It was billed as the smallest Bible in the world, but if you look into it, it wasn’t.”
The Bible was published by the American branch of the Oxford University Press and states it “can easily be read with a magnifying glass”.
It was discovered as a result of a comprehensive survey of uncatalogued items in the Leeds collections, carried out during Covid lockdowns.
The search yielded more than 3,000 items, which sounds like a huge figure, but was not a total surprise, Isaac said.
“I think a lot of libraries have similar problems. With these objects, if people did know about them they were in people’s heads. In this day and age if objects aren’t online then people don’t think you have them.”
Other newly catalogued items include photographs from the 1904 rescue mission of Captain Scott’s first expedition to Antarctica by the crew of The Morning ship.
Another object is huge compared with the resurfaced Bible: a magnificent and rare botanical book by Priscilla Susan Bury called A Selection of Hexandrian Plants, published 1831-1834. Measuring 64cm by 48cm, it had only 79 subscribers, one of them being the Birds of America illustrator John James Audubon.
Isaac said the important message was that anyone could come in to the library and view the objects.
“You don’t have to be an academic or a researcher,” she said. “If you’re just interested, we can get them out for you and you can come and read them in our beautiful Grade II-listed building, which is a wonderful place to come and do some studying.
“We would rather these books were used and read. That’s what they were made for and that’s what we encourage people to come in and do, instead of locking them away.”
There may also be someone who knows precisely why the tiny Bible is in the Leeds collection in the first place. “We don’t know. It’s a bit of a mystery really.”
• This article was amended on 6 May 2022 to refer to the Leeds Central library rather than Leeds Libraries, and to link correctly to its website instead of that of the Leeds Library, which is a separate institution.
