Library Lives plots the lifelong love affair between one particular bookworm and the John Rylands Library in Manchester, its collections drawn from every corner and period of the textual and meta-textual world. How do we read – and what can we read from – a potsherd, a locket, a fragment of papyrus, a gorgeously illuminated medieval manuscript, an envelope, a seemingly ordinary book?

Stella Halkyard, one of the library's erstwhile archivists, tells the life stories of some of this great library's previously unsung treasures and provides radical new readings for a few of its acclaimed gems. In a sequence of idiosyncratic and often playful short essays she celebrates the resonance of these objects and their ability to tell stories that range across time and place, from the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, to John Donne's shroud, eighteenth-century Chinese papermaking, Elizabeth Bishop's letters, plastic surgery in sixteenth-century Italy, the lining of Walt Whitman's hat, and Delia Derbyshire's wartime gas mask.

Selected from Halkyard's popular 'Pictures from a Library' and 'Archive Corner' features published in PN Review over the last two decades, these essays have been brought together for the first time and put into productive dialogue with each other.