Nathaniel Hawthorne walked into the library in 1853 and was appalled. He had come to Chester as American Consul to Liverpool, looking for the kind of medieval atmosphere he could not find in New England, and what he found instead was a room full of books slowly rotting. The cathedral library, he wrote, was "in a discreditable state of decay." The bindings were splitting. The shelves sagged. Generations of monks and canons and deans had piled books into the space without much sense of how to keep them alive, and now the works of St Werburgh's medieval scholars were quietly turning into dust. He left a few weeks later, slightly disgusted. He could not have known that the library would outlive both his contempt and his country's confidence in such places. It is still here.
The library predates the building it sits in. In 1541, when Henry VIII dissolved the Benedictine abbey of St Werburgh and converted its church into the new cathedral of Chester, the abbey library was already there - a working collection probably assembled over at least three and a half centuries. The first solid evidence of monastic scribes here dates from before 1200. The Polychronicon, a fourteenth-century universal history written by the monk Ranulf Higden, was composed within these walls; his name is one of the few Chester scholars whose work still appears in modern bibliographies. When the monasteries fell, most cathedral libraries were stripped or burned or simply scattered. Chester's survived because the institution itself survived. The books stayed where they were and the people changed denominations around them.
For most of its early life the library grew the way old libraries grow: by accident, by bequest, by the death of clergymen with good shelves. In 1727 the cathedral bought up the entire 500-volume library of the late Prebendary Thane for one hundred and five pounds - a serious sum then, equivalent to multiple years of a working man's wages. Around the same time Dean James Arderne died and left the cathedral five hundred pounds outright plus an annual rent of more than sixty-seven pounds for the library's upkeep. These bequests gave the place a working endowment. The books were moved into the restored chapter house in 1728 and the library began, for the first time, to look like a serious scholarly collection rather than a parish accumulation. Among its treasures, kept here still, is a copy of Higden's Polychronicon, an English translation printed in London in the early sixteenth century, and a two-volume Biblia Latina printed at Cologne in 1477, only twenty-odd years after Gutenberg.
By the 1980s, parts of the library had reached a state that Hawthorne could not have imagined and would have recognised immediately. The contents had drifted across the cathedral campus into five separate rooms, none of them ideal. The chapter house collection - both the books and the bookcases - was wrapped in mould. The spores blooming on medieval bindings, the dust of centuries softened into something biological and hungry. A full programme of repair, cleaning, restoration, rebinding, and re-cataloguing began. It took the better part of two decades. Two rooms above St Anselm's Chapel were refurbished to house the books while their old quarters were stabilised. A new staircase replaced the cramped spiral. A grant of fifty thousand pounds from the Heritage Lottery Fund kept the project funded through its worst stretches. Bookcases were sourced from wherever they could be found - some from the closing Knutsford Public Library, display cases from the John Rylands Library in Manchester. In September 2007 the refurbished space - now called the Exhibition Library - was opened by the Duke of Westminster.
Visitors who arrange a tour through one of the cathedral's organised groups will find a library that is small by the standards of great cathedral collections, perhaps a few thousand volumes in total, but unusually intimate. The Exhibition Library room is long and well-lit, the air kept dry now in ways that the medieval canons could not have managed. The books are arranged in sloping-top bookcases - the original design by the architect Edward Ould, who replaced the old high cases between 1896 and 1898. Some of the volumes are chained, in the medieval style. Some are kept under glass. The Biblia Latina is one of those: a Cologne-printed Bible from 1477, its rubricated initials still glowing red against ivory parchment that is now closer to bone in colour. The Polychronicon, in its early English print, sits beside it. A working medieval book and a working medieval translation, both still in their home institution, both still readable, both still here because someone in every century from the twelfth to the twenty-first chose to keep them rather than let them go.
Hawthorne was right about what he saw in 1853. The library was neglected; his own observation was part of what shamed the chapter into doing better. Dean Howson took the project in hand between 1867 and 1885 and the collection was enlarged and reorganised under his watch. The Victorian librarians who followed had no illusions about the difficulty of the task or the small audience that would ever care, but they kept turning up. The strange truth about an institutional library is that it is not really an object but a relay race - a transfer of attention from one custodian to the next, century after century, with each one deciding to keep going. Hawthorne saw a moment of failure. The library, taken whole, is the story of how many moments of failure can be repaired.
Located at 53.19 degrees north, 2.89 degrees west, in the centre of Chester immediately adjacent to the cathedral. Best viewed from 2,000 to 3,000 feet, where the red sandstone cathedral and its surrounding cloisters are clearly visible against the older Roman street plan. Hawarden (EGNR) is 4 nautical miles west, Liverpool John Lennon (EGGP) to the north, and RAF Shawbury (EGOS) to the south. The library is not open to casual visitors but accepts organised group bookings.