The Newcastle Collection on public view

A grant of more than £400,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund means the collections have been brought together and will now have a special display area, with sympathetic lighting and climate control, in the new library.

Currently library staff are sorting out all the material in the collection, establishing exactly what they have.

Only those wearing white gloves can touch - but I was able to run a hand across the surface of Thomas Bewick's old work table, tracing the gouges and scratches and wondering if they had resulted from a slip of the great man's hand.

Hard to imagine, really, given the delicacy of his famous miniature woodblock prints.

Some of these are in the collection, too, including a charming one called The King's Birthday, showing a drunken man under a hedge who has obviously imbibed excessively on royalist fervour.

Probably the Bewick, Avison and Crawhall collections will strike a chord with many library viewers. But how many people know about George Gibsone's exquisite shell paintings?

Gibsone's Conches is a collection comprising 7,260 watercolours of 3,025 species of sea shell. They were bought for the city by public subscription in 1890 and, more than a century later, the public is to get the true benefit of them.

I reckon the City Library is sitting on a goldmine here for these wonderful paintings - all, I assume, anatomically correct - would grace many a home. Some, indeed, have been reproduced to hang in the new library building. Lots of people are going to covet them.

Anyone who loves old books would find plenty to get excited about in the Newcastle Collection - even though these are probably the only books in the new library that we won't be able to leaf through.

Open on a desk when I had a preview of some of the material was The Anatomy of An Horse by Andrew Snape, published in 1686. (I loved that "an horse".)

It is described on the title page as "An exact and full Description of the Frame, Situation and Connexion of all his Parts (with their Actions and Uses) expressed in Forty nine copper-plates".

A tantalising volume called A Course of Chirurgical Operations, dating from 1710, was open at a page devoted to "the Delivery of Women" and showed a scary array of gynaecological instruments.

"Chirurgical" is an outmoded word for surgical.

Angela Forster, City Library Development Manager, commented that visiting children always seem to love the gorier bits of books - although the text beneath the illustration seemed pretty sensible to this 21st Century reader, basically advising "don't try this at home if you don't know what you're doing - or if you are a man".

The Republica Moscoviae et Urbes, of 1603, is a small book which would not leap off the shelf at Waterstone's or anywhere else. But apparently it is valuable for being a very early example of a book with a vellum jacket.

Yesterday there were all sorts of things tantalisingly half on view. A bust of Thomas Bewick, enshrined in bubble wrap, cut a sinister figure but will no doubt look proud and stately when installed in the new Newcastle Collection viewing room.

The contents of the collection can be seen on-line already at www.newcastle.gov.uk/newcastlecollection. But it will be seen at its best 'in the flesh' at the new library when it opens to the public.

Many people will wonder, no doubt, why Newcastle has been hiding so much of its light under a bushel for all these years.

With this about to open, and the Great North Museum opening to the public on May 23, the accusation that the North East is not equipped to look after priceless artefacts (implied during the long-running debate over the Lindisfarne Gospels) can no longer be made to stick.