If I’m going to be completely honest, Manchester blew away my expectations. I booked my trip as a stopover point, an easy gateway to fly into before heading to Scotland. Sure, it makes up a large portion of the UK’s second biggest metro area. Yes, it has been an economic and industrial power, so dominating the clothing industry that Abraham Lincoln wrote to the people there apologizing for the blockade of Southern cotton during the Civil War, insisting that those suffering in Manchester with the loss of their livelihoods were doing as much for the cause of freedom as the Union army. The city has beautiful Victorian architecture, lovely green spaces, modern buildings going up everywhere. But even then, even knowing all of this, Manchester still exceeded my hopes. The biggest reason? Libraries.

Manchester is home to four stunning temples of books, all located within the easily walkable and lovely city center. Each offers a different feel, different stories, and both cool architecture and some great old books. Plus, visiting them will lead to a terrific circuit of the city. So yeah, if you have a day in Manchester, as odd as it sounds, make it a library day!

Chetham’s Library is the only one of the four with an admission fee, a £13 tour that runs a couple times per day. It sits on the grounds of Chetham’s School of Music, all part of an area that was once a school for boys of poor families established in 1515. The buildings themselves date back even further, once being a manor home, then a collegiate church.

In 1653, the now empty set of buildings was purchased by the estate of Humphrey Chetham, as one of the wealthy textile merchant’s very specific directions in his will. He desired to open northern England’s first public library in the space, and dedicated a substantial amount of money for the purchase of books, in addition to the costs of buying the buildings and renovating them. The library opened that same year, and has been in continuous use ever since, making it the oldest public reference library in the English-speaking world.

A tour takes about an hour, and includes some of the original buildings and furnishings from the library’s former lives as well as the bookshelves themselves, which occupy the second floor of one wing. Some features certainly stand out.

First, all of the books are behind locked gates. This is actually an improvement over the earlier system, which saw all books attached to their shelves by chains. Books were so valuable at the time that theft was a huge risk, hence the chains and then gates.

Second, the reading room, which contains a large carved crest of Chetham’s coat of arms, also holds a desk in a side nook, one used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their research here.

And finally, we come to the books themselves. The collection contains more than 100,000 at this point, and while the most valuable are not on active display, some treasures can be found, like the first printings of Homer or St. Augustine.

(Upon leaving Chetham’s Library, make sure to take the opportunity to visit the free Manchester Cathedral, a gothic edifice built originally in 1421, but with significant renovations in more recent years. It is one of the few buildings to pre-date the library, and as it is a two minute walk away, it’s a good excuse to pop in.)

Moving forward in time, we reach the year 1802, when a group of Manchester businessmen desired to open a public library for themselves, focused on more modern – at the time – books. The Portico Library opened four years later, in 1806, the result of a large number of private donations rather than a single endowment. While anyone could visit, a members-only reading room provided the highlight on the second floor. Today, that same room is still there, although only the second floor hosts the library itself, with the remainder of the building having been leased out for financial reasons.

Many of the books at the Portico Library are in poorer condition, but an adopt-a-book campaign is restoring them, with opportunities to pick one’s favorite volume! (Fun fact: the books at Portico are, while loosely organized by genre, housed in the order they were acquired by the library, rather than alphabetical, by publish date, or anything else. Fortunately there is a card catalog.)

The Portico Library, I am also happy to share, is currently in the midst of a feasibility study and fundraising campaign to repurchase the entire building.

With the turn of the twentieth century, my favorite library was added to Manchester’s pantheon. Enriqueta Rylands endowed a beautiful Victorian building to be a free public library in memory of her husband, one of the largest textile barons in the city. It opened on January 1, 1900 and has been available to the public ever since.

The Rylands Library building is something special, a masterpiece in brick and stone, with medieval-appearing porticos, some of the city’s first purpose-built electric lights, and beautiful iron grates. And then there is the long reading room.

The room is tall, bright thanks to huge stained glass windows featuring philosophers, and houses a truly stunning collection of books. The Rylands Library actually houses the majority of the special collections of the University of Manchester library system, and while not everything is on display, there are some cool finds to be discovered.

My personal highlight? A first print Nostradamus, one of very few in existence.

(Though not on display, the collection also includes a Gutenberg Bible and a number of illuminated manuscripts.)

Finally, we come to Manchester Central Library, sitting in a place of honor just off the city’s Albert Square, which is worth a visit, or will be once construction on the magnificent city hall is finished. It will be a bit.

Opened in 1934, Manchester Central Library is a colossal neoclassical temple. It is massive, and as beautiful as a central library in a city full of amazing libraries needed to be.

While the interior isn’t anything really special, a view upward is fun.

Manchester is awesome, and the center of the city is full of cool things to do and see. But your day exploring these four historic and stunning libraries will be the highlight of your trip.

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