Comics UK

This old Pathe film from 1937 has a renowned penny dreadful collector talking about and showing some of his collection.:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgS9Bq2 ... e=youtu.be

Lovely stuff indeed.

Brilliant! I hope his remarkable collection has been preserved intact.

Lovely, but I get a woman singing a song over most of the vid for some reason!

philcom55 wrote:Brilliant! I hope his remarkable collection has been preserved intact.

It was passed on to the British Library.

That's good to know Raven. The funny thing is that a copy of every publication to be printed in the country was supposed to be lodged with the British Library - but people seem to have looked down on Penny Dreadfuls and comics so much that lots of them slipped through the net!

philcom55 wrote:The funny thing is that a copy of every publication to be printed in the country was supposed to be lodged with the British Library - but people seem to have looked down on Penny Dreadfuls and comics so much that lots of them slipped through the net!

The fact that the Ono collection was handed over as a bequest to the British Library does not mean that we can assume that they had not received every one of the Penny Dreadfuls in the collection at the time of their publication. They probably hadn't but if they had known about their existence presumably they would have tried to chase them up. However, It was almost certainly a hit-and-miss situation because their current right to receive a copy of every printed item was not enshrined in law until 1911, as far as I'm aware.

The Ono collection will have been catalogued as a collection, and will be available for readers to consult in the same way as all their other holdings, including their original Penny Dreadfuls, whether bound or not.

It may be of interest that when I was researching my missing issues of Diana there a few weeks ago, in one of the bound volumes for 1975 there was a copy of a letter bound in that had been sent by the British Library to Thomsons on 21 July 1975 informing them that they had not received a copy of that very week's issue, and asking for it to be sent as soon as possible in accordance with the provisions of section 15 of the Copyright Act 1911 (1 & 2 Geo. V, chapter 46) as amended by section 4 of the British Library Act 1972 (1972, chapter 54). They sent it!