V&A Theatre Collections Online

The V&A Theatre Museum sadly closed in 2007 and the theatre collections are now part of the main museum, with special new galleries.

The Theatre and Performance holdings are awe-inspiring: playbills and programmes, prints and posters, as well as artefacts, costumes, ceramics, etc., etc. There are excellent pages on researching theatre and performance, an overview of the V&A theatre and performance collections and excellent illustrated essays on such topics as 18th century theatre,  19th century theatre, Circus, etc, and a series of subject hubs which include Theatre History, Pantomime (already discussed in an earlier post), Dance, Music Hall and Variety, Circus, and Black Theatre and Performance.  These hubs lead to essays, videos, images, biographies, links and reading lists.

Much is digitised and you can search the collections. Initially searches are initiated across the V&A collections, often revealing fascinating and unexpected references, but they can then be narrowed by category, collection, material, name, place, subject, technique, etc.   My search for benefit ticket, for example, returned items from Prints and Drawings as well as the Theatre Collections, as did my search for Vauxhall Gardens (screen shot).

A very rich resource.

© V&A Images

Seed catalogues 3: The US National Agricultural Library

The National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture) has, within its Special Collections, a major collection of seed catalogues: The Henry G. Gilbert Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection. There are 200,000 catalogues, from America and a wide range of other countries (including Britain), mostly from 1890 to the present but with some dating back to the late 18th century. The image gallery presents selected covers of catalogues from the US by period (1750-1875, 1876-1900, 1901-1925) and from Japan, mostly from the Yokohama Nursery Co,. Ltd.

(C) National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture)

The Library also has a collection of posters relating to the Women's Land Army, War, Rural Electrification Administration, and the World's Poultry Congress.

Seed catalogues 2: The John Johnson Collection

The early seedsmen's catalogues in the John Johnson Collection were identified and removed to guardbooks. They are cited in the pioneering work of John Harvey in Early horticultural catalogues: a checklist of trade catalogues issued by firms of nurserymen and seedsmen in Great Britain and Ireland down to the year 1850, . The shelfmarks (Johnson a.50 and Johnson d.1640) can be searched for in SOLO  Other Bodleian seed catalogues can be found by keyword searches on SOLO, or by referring to the annotated copy of Harvey (op cit) on the open shelves in the Special Collections Reading Room.

Seedsmen's lists and later catalogues remain in the Horticulture section (boxes and outsize folders).   The catalogues have not yet been digitised, except for Oxford seedsmen and nurserymen, which fall within Oxford Trade (box 5). These are available through the ProQuest project: The John Johnson Collection: an archive of printed ephemera. Notable are late 19th century catalogues by C.B. Anstey.

Trade cards for Horticulture, Nurserymen and Seedsmen (Trade Cards 14 (2-14)) are available through the JJ online catalogue.

The image below shows a broadside Catalogue of American trees and shrubs that will endure the climate of England, issued by Christopher Grey/Gray, nurseryman in Fulham, c. 1740. He was the first to receive Magnolia grandiflora from North America into Britain, and to propogate it, in c. 1734.

John Johnson Coll. Horticulture large folder

Seed catalogues 1: Oregon State University Libraries

It is National Gardening Week, and this seems a very good time to focus on seed catalogues.

Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections has a very useful and well presented online exhibit on early seed catalogues, based on the collection assembled by the former agricultural librarian, Laura Kelts. There are over 2,000 items in the collection, from 1832 to 1966, which include seed catalogues from Great Britain, Holland and other European and Asian countries, as well as (predominantly) North America. The holdings are particularly strong in North American catalogues of the 1940s.

The website gives the history of both British and American seed catalogues. It is divided into pages on the Earliest European seed and nursery catalogues, Early 19th century catalogues (with separate pages for British and American catalogues, Mid 19th century,  Late 19th and early 20th century, World War I, 1920s, 1930s, World War II and 1945-1960.  The appendices are devoted to Art and photography in seed catalogues and, perhaps most useful of all, there is an excellent page of links to other collections and exhibits, mostly in the USA, but also in Britain, Holland and Canada and introducing the Lindley Library (Royal Horticultural Society) project to locate all European seed catalogues, and a separate Bibliography.  Which is why I have called this Seed catalogues I: there is much more to explore!