This week has been spent mainly sorting out my stuff. When I packed it up to move last month there were boxes marked “books” and “comics” but it wasn’t particularly strict. Since it’s going into storage I want to be able to tell exactly what’s in which box should I need to look for stuff in the future, so no mixing and decent labelling is in order. And also a bit of thinning out, chucking away bits of stationary and odds and sods that I wouldn’t mind hanging onto but don’t need. By now this isn’t such a major thing as I’ve been thinning out my stuff a lot over the last three or four moves, but there’s still a surprising amount of crap in there.
The main objective has been to separate my small press comics and zine collection away from the rest of my stuff. After ten+ years in this lark it’s amounted to a quite impressive range from all over the world, though mainly the UK. I’ve often wondered what to do with it all, especially as over half of it isn’t of any real interest to me. I know I’m keeping it all because it’s of archival importance (a lot of it only had print runs of 50 or 100) but it just sits there, waiting for that importance to come to fruition.
So, since it’s now isolated into 7 boxes I’m hereby naming it “The BugPowder Archive” and donating it to the community at large. In practice this doesn’t mean much at the moment because it’s just going to sit with the rest of my stuff in storage, but in theory it can now be used by researchers and the like who want to see what underground comics and zines were really like in the 90s. The collection is particularly strong on the period between 1993 and 1998 when I was at the height of my reviewing and selling and many people were sending me their new comics as a matter of course. I also had a habit of buying nearly every small press comic I saw at festivals, conventions and marts to bolster to the collection further.
Ideally I’d like there to be somewhere the archive could be stored, catalogued and made available to the public. This ain’t gonna happen for long while yet, but work could be done on it in the meanwhile. And then other collections could be added to it building up a comprehensive library of works from the last 30-40 years. It’s a dream, but it’s got to start somewhere.
What I plan to do it get 2 or 3 people to be trustees of the archive, along with myself, to ensure that it doesn’t get split up or lost, and then for us to take applications from people who want to catalogue it or just borrow it for a period of time. And then should a suitable place become available for it to be made public then we can go with that.
But right now it’s going into storage.
I’ve been wondering what to do with my small press pile too. I’ve been on quite an aggressive comics-weeding program recently, but the sp stuff is totally excluded from that. It just seems wrong. At the moment though, there’s no alternative but to keep it “for posterity”.
On a BP BTW thing – now I’ve got the scanner in the attic with me, I’m planning to add some scans of people’s early work to the Wiki. That Denny Derbyshire stuff I was rambling about for instance, and maybe a PDF of an early Battleground.
I too have that ‘whole loads of comics’ thing going on down. I’d be quite interested in joining in/being a trustee/possibly helping catalogue. I’ll also post the link to this on the CAPTION LJ community, in case any financial help from them might be forthcoming (you never know).
Jez – be careful with what you scan. I know that Ed Pinsent for one is very very chary about letting people copy/use images of his. I’ve not heard that of Denny, but I would definitely urge you to get Ed’s permission before scanning any of his stuff. (Gav Burrows did a Primitif postcard some years ago, and withdrew it hastily when Ed objected.)
hmmmm
an archive – also – ZUM! has lots & is stored haphazardly in the eaves of the house… this is the legacy of things past…
something as organised & idealistic as a small press archive would be grand – i think there’s this bunch of people on canada -esda- or summat who have organised one.
looking into that ‘how to get a grant’ article looks more interesting…
oxford would be a nice place for a location…
as for an ‘online’ resource.. well – such things are fraught with copyright problems…
In December I got an order (via Shane Chebsey) for one of my “Little box of comics” to go to a guy in ‘Serials’ in the ‘National Art Library’ at the V & A, in S.Kensington. I’d never heard of them before but they appear to collect various interesting zines, art books, chap books and other ephemera, which is open to the public(possibly by appointment). Their website http://www.nal.vam.ac.uk/projects/welcome.html
seems to be down at the moment, which is a shame as I can’t remember the exact details of the collection.
They have a limited budget, so maybe you could donate your collection there, if you run out of options.
I’m going to be careful about scanning stuff, obviously. The Denny Derbyshire stuff I specifically mentioned, I was meaning a panel or two, just to get a flavour of it. Extracts are one thing, whole comics an entirely different matter. Battleground, I think, and certainly Vicious had a stated “your contribution might end up on the web, please say if you don’t won’t it there” thing going on.
I was reading about the small press library at Angloume, France. I agree that Oxford would be a pretty good place for a similar collection. It’s definitely worth applying for funding.