Toller Lecture revised and updated lectures from 1987 to 1997, together with new essays on Toller and the Toller Collection in the John Rylands Library, was published in 2003. However, with the establishment of the John Rylands Research Institute, the decision was made to prioritise the Special Collections of the Library in a revamped "Bulletin of the John Rylands Library", and Toller lectures were no longer published there. It was therefore decided to publish recent Toller lectures as a separate collection which appeared in 2017. Toller Lecture The Toller Lecture is an annual lecture at the University of Manchester's Manchester Centre for
John Rylands Library and the fact that the valuable manuscript collections were to be housed in "that dirty, uncomfortable city ... [with] not enough light to read by, and the books they already have are wretchedly kept" (written in 1901 about the Crawford MSS.) Mrs Rylands negotiated Deeds of Agreement with her neighbours to fix the heights of future adjacent buildings. The permissible height of the building was fixed at just over 34 feet, but it was suggested that it could be taller at the centre if there was an open area around the edges, at the height of buildings that had been