James Crossley FSA (31 March 1800 – 1 August 1883) was an English lawyer, author, bibliophile and literary scholar who was President of the Chetham Society from 1847 to 1883 and President of the Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire from 1878 to 1883.
[2] He perpetrated a literary fraud, the forging of Fragment on Mummies, supposedly by Sir Thomas Browne, that was a highly successful hoax.
[4] He set up the Chetham Society in 1843, with Thomas Corser, Francis Robert Raines and others: it was named after Humphrey Chetham and its purpose was to edit and publish historical works relating to Lancashire and Cheshire.
He is said to have collected 100,000 books at his residence in Chorlton on Medlock and later Stocks House, Cheetham, Manchester.
[12][13] Media related to James Crossley (author) at Wikimedia Commons