Latest Acquisitions (Sep 2022)
Aviation loose pages
A short while ago the archive purchased several thousand loose pages of aviation advertisements spanning a period from 1910 to the 1960s. Because these are loose advertisements their best value to the archive will be to put them into our “product files” which are ordered by company and product. Historically we would scan and then database each item but this takes a huge amount of time to do and is not best use of the limited volunteer time we have.
Using the Pareto Principle (for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes – in our case 80% of the value of an advertisement comes from 20% of the effort in making it accessible) we decided to simply file each advertisement and only scan and database it when needed.
Working with Evelyn, one of our volunteers, we first of all took the loose pages and sorted them alphabetically by the first letter of the company so that we had stacks of A, B, C... through to Z. We then took the “B” and “D” stacks and went through those to extract any material for “Boulton Paul Ltd” and “Dowty” (I intend to use this material for a newsletter article). Once these were extracted they were then sorted into company and then product and filed in folders. The outcome of this exercise which only took a few hours has resulted in the easy accessibility of over 200 advertisements.
We shall continue this process until all the thousands of loose adverts are sorted and filed. Once this is done we shall move on to the many hundreds of thousands of other adverts we have in our duplicates area.
As a result of this I shall also introduce a new measure into the archive statistics called “number of product file folders” to show progress in the filing of loose advertisements. Our opening tally prior to this exercise is 75 folders. This will certainly increase over the coming months.
Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes
While visiting the Congleton Jazz and Blues Festival (very highly recommended if you like Jazz and Blues) I popped into the Victoria Mill Antiques Centre which is a favourite haunt of mine as I always manage to come away with something exciting. This occasion was no exception as I found five volumes of Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes. Volume I was published in January 1825 and I obtained five of the first six volumes (missing Vol. 3). Dating is confusing because sometimes there are two printed dates in the volume.
Volume. I – January 1st 1825 + 1827 (New Series)
Volume II – April 1825 + 1825
Volume IV – January 1839 + 1826
Volume V – April 22 1826 + 1826
Volume VI – January 1st 1825 + 1827 (New Series)
Although a small book I bought them for the superb engravings enclosed, most of which were done by J Rogers. The books themselves are about actors and plays, giving biographies and reviews of key players and plays they have appeared in. They are a very interesting read and a lovely acquisition to the archive.
Architectural Metalwork catalogues
Following a talk about the archive that Angie Thompson gave to the Cheshire Family History Society a few weeks ago we were introduced to David Whitworth who is just retiring at the age of 90 from an architect’s practice in Bollington. David has very kindly offered his collection of Architectural Ironmongers catalogues he used in his job. These catalogues covered about 5 metres of shelf space, spanned over 60 years and came from companies all over the world.
We now have the very pleasant task of cataloguing them and making them accessible to researchers.
