The Alchemy Research Library

List of the books at present in this library . Wish list of items . People who have donated books.

Glasgow has the finest collection of early alchemical books in the world - the Ferguson Collection has 7000 books (of which over half are on alchemy) and the Young Collection has a further 1300 books. Together they provide access to 85-90% of all alchemical books. There are also over 330 alchemical manuscripts in the Ferguson collection, many with beautiful coloured illustrations. All these books and manuscripts are securely held in these University Libraries and are kept in optimum environmental conditions. Glasgow University Library has a purpose built department of special collections with all the resources needed to study such material.

The only problem with the collections in Glasgow is that they were completed in the early 20th century and few modern books of commentary, interpretation and history have been added. This is a great lack, and means that it is often not possible to consult key modern works when looking at the old material in these collections.

In 1997 I set up an Alchemical Research Library here in Glasgow founded on my own modest collection to form the basis for this research library. After some five years of collecting this now amounts to over 950 books, and many hundreds of articles.