Quick Memorial Library

The Collection 

Subject: Education 

Over 950 books and 90 bound volumes of pamphlets covering the theory, practice, and history of education and the methodology of individual subjects. They date from the mid-sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century. Sixteenth-century educational classics by Roger Ascham, Thomas Elyot and Richard Mulcaster are present in early editions. Early school textbooks cover English grammar, Latin, modern foreign languages, and mathematics. Writers range from renowned authors in several titles or editions (Charles Hoole; Johann Amos Comenius), to obscure seventeenth- and eighteenth-century schoolmasters represented by a single title. The ephemeral nature of school textbooks renders some formerly common editions rare or even unique. Some sport typical schoolboy pen trials and other scribbles. 

The pamphlets in particular include studies of different levels of education, from kindergartens to mechanics’ institutes; different sorts of schools; education in a wide variety of subjects; in various countries; and targeted at different levels of society, Reports of educational visits are also present. Some pamphlets are in French or German, and some are published in America. Overall, the library contains works of most major educational thinkers from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century; biographies; histories of schools and encyclopaedias of education. There is also material on the education of the poor and missionary education activities, together with a small amount of moral children’s fiction. 

The library is primarily the collection of the Reverend Robert Hebert Quick (1831-1891), schoolmaster and writer on education (see ODNB; Robert Hebert Quick, Life and Remains of R.H. Quick, ed. by F. Storr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899)). It includes several volumes from the library of nineteenth-century schoolmaster William Henry Widgery, other collections formerly belonging to the Education Guild, and some later additions. The library was given to the University in 1929 by the Education Guild, formerly the Teachers’ Guild of Great Britain & Ireland, to whom Quick’s widow had donated it in 1900.