As the New Year approaches, here’s a quick look back at some Quaker Strongrooms blog highlights of 2017.

The most popular post was Quaker women: resources for women’s history in the Library of the Society of Friends, published in March – women’s history month. It offered a broad overview of the great women’s history resources that the Library has to offer. In it we described some selected primary sources here, both printed and archival, and a range of biographical and historical works invaluable for anyone interested in the subject.

The Quaker Meeting, oil painting attributed to Egbert van Heemskerk, late 17th century (Library reference: F070)

Posters are a powerful way to convey a strong, succinct message. Quakers say it loud was published to coincide with our reading room display on Quaker posters early in the year. In the display, reduced size facsimile posters were hung in the limited space available, to give an overview of the fascinating range of (mainly 20th century) posters that have been produced by British Quakers. A different selection was displayed in the autumn. The blogpost proved interesting to lots of people, with requests for reproductions and full scale displays elsewhere.

The first post of 2017 highlighted some Library material relating to the origins and development of the “Eight Foundations of a True Social Order”, inspired by Reimagining a True Social Order, a rich  new resource produced by academics at Leeds in collaboration with Quakers in Britain, Woodbrooke and others.

At the other end of the year, in December, the blog carried a post on Quakers and the Nobel Peace Prize, to celebrate the 2017 award (to International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) and mark the 70th anniversary of the joint award of the prize to British and American Quakers in 1947. Read the blogpost to learn about some of the reasons for the award, and contemporary reactions of Friends drawn from personal papers held in the Library’s manuscript collections.

As always, we aim to cover a variety of topics in the blog, highlighting the different parts of the Library’s printed, archival and visual collections, and spanning a wide range of topics and historical periods. A collection of early printed books and their provenance were the subject of A 17th century Recording Clerk’s library: Richard Richardson’s books. The books were catalogued as one of the final parts of our printed materials “Retrospective Cataloguing Project” which has yielded some fascinating insights into Quaker publishing over the centuries, recounted on the blog and elsewhere, alongside successfully achieving its goal of making full information about the collection widely available.

Fragments of mediaeval printed and manuscript waste used in the binding of Richardson Collection 3

Other posts included:

• “In turbulent times”: sources on local Quakers and their meetings over the centuries, on local Quaker history sources in our collections, focusing particularly on Quaker stories from Cumbria, with some fascinating extracts from archive and manuscript sources across the centuries (particularly the 18th).
• From cupola, portico or archway: Quaker school magazines, published at the beginning of the school year, drawing our attention to an underused resource for biographers and family historians, as well as anyone interested in the history of education.
• Refugees and relief, a post to mark Refugee Week, looking at historical work with refugees, illustrated by some strikingly poignant photographs from both world wars and the Spanish Civil War.

Whatever your interests, we hope you’ve found something good to read on Quaker Strongrooms over 2017. And we wish you all the best for a happy 2018!