Throughout its history The Tower of Cambridge University Library has generated awe, rumour, myth, and fascination. An afterthought, built to house copyright collections deemed of ‘secondary’ importance. Now The Tower and its collections inform contemporary research, inspire writers, and represent over a century of British literary, domestic and popular history. You are invited to uncover the secret history of this remarkable structure.

Public exhibition: 2 May 2018 – 28 October 2018

Monday – Friday 09:00–18:00

Saturday 09:00–16:30

Sunday closed

Cambridge University Library Milstein Exhibition Centre

Free admission – all welcome

Collecting the stories of your UL.

To coincide with the opening of our latest exhibition Tall Tales: Secrets of the Tower, Cambridge University Library is crowd sourcing the memories, stories and favourite extracts of readers past and present. The University Library building reverberates with the history of things read, knowledge created, and people met. We want to capture those moments.

In the seventeenth century, the womb was regarded as a troublesome and unpredictable organ which afflicted women with numerous ailments. To pacify the wild womb, marriage was usually prescribed, but a favoured short-term remedy was fumigation. Like a second nose, the womb was considered to be attracted to pleasant perfumes and repulsed by stench. A womb could therefore be coaxed back to its ‘rightful place’ by wafting fragrant ingredients beneath it. Smelly Remedy shows examples of this procedure from the University Library collection and examines how the remedy was visually represented to a wide readership.

Landscapes Below celebrates a period of experimental geological map-making in the 19th century, focusing on the use of colour in geological maps and on the development of a visual vocabulary for the new science.

Cambridge University is delighted to be working with the BBC and First Story in the Young Writers' Award for 2018. If you are aged 14 to 18 and love writing, why not enter your story of up to 1000 words? This virtual exhibition offers a treasure trove of potential inspiration…

This exhibition looks at the events of the October Revolution and the year that followed, using a wide range of material from the University Library’s collections to illustrate the dramatic timeline.  Undergraduates from the University will share in the curatorial work.

2017 is the 500^th anniversary of the events that brought about a permanent religious schism within Western Christendom. This digital exhibition explores how Europe’s multiple and competing Reformations have been remembered, forgotten, contested, and re-invented since the sixteenth century. A collaborative enterprise between Cambridge University Library, Lambeth Palace Library, and York Minster Library, it displays some of the many treasures in their collections. It is a product of a major interdisciplinary project, ‘Remembering the Reformation’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

View online by clicking on the image to the left.

For a thousand years the Jewish community of Old Cairo put their worn-out writings into a synagogue storage room, a genizah. Explore one of the greatest collections of Cambridge University Library and a remarkable survival of the medieval past. Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo provides a window on the life of a community a thousand years ago – a Jewish community in the centre of a thriving Islamic empire, international in outlook, multicultural in make up, devout to its core.

Find out why the University Library has a pair of Indian slippers in its collections, how psychic thumbprints were made, and why Charles Darwin was sent beard hair in the post. From an ostrich feather and ectoplasm to an old boot and a boomerang, the curious objects in this exhibition all have a part to play in telling the story of the Library, and form a cabinet of curiosities that opens a window onto the nature of collecting.