downthetubes Interview: John Birch, Comics Keeper

downthetubes: What is your job in the National Library Of Scotland and what does it involve?

John Birch: I’m currently the Assistant Purchase Curator in the Acquisitions Unit of the Legal Deposit and Modern Collections Division. I deal with the library’s subscriptions and help the Purchase Team acquire foreign material for the library’s modern collections.

downthetubes: How far back does the library have comics?

John: The Library began to collect weekly/monthly comics systemically through legal deposit in the early 1970s though we do hold earlier issues some of which have been acquired by donation and occasionally purchase. Some of the earliest comics we hold include an issue of Ally Sloper's Half Holiday for April 27, 1889 and Puck for May 20, 1911. We have The Beano from September 8, 1951, The Dandy from January 1, 1972 and 2000AD and Starlord from April 7, 1979.

downthetubes: How complete is the library's collection of weekly comics related publications such as annuals and summer specials?

John: This is very difficult to say. We know we lack some of the earliest issues but our holdings of the annuals are better. We have the Dandy annual from 1938, the Beano annual from 1944 and the Topper annual from 1956. We try to collect titles with a Scottish connection as comprehensively as possible; this includes underground comics such as Near Myths, Electric Soup, Northern Lightz and S*** the Dog, though this will depend upon us finding out about them or publishers depositing automatically.

We are always keen to fill in gaps in our collections, either by legal deposit, donation or purchase.

downthetubes: What is the legal policy on collecting fanzines and small press comics?

John: The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 allows the Library to request a copy of any work published in the United Kingdom or Ireland, to be provided free of charge. Our policy is to collect Scottish publications as comprehensively as possible and the Library is keen to collect as many fanzines and small press comics as we possibly can. They are as important a part of our cultural and printed heritage as any other, and they need to be collected and preserved so that they can be read, both now and in the future. You can find more on legal deposit on the NLS site.

However, our main difficulty is in finding out what has been produced, so if you are a publisher, then we would love to hear from you.

downthetubes: Comic collectors know of the problems of drying glue and rusty staples on old comics. How does the library store their copies?

John: The Library used to bind comics to protect them. But now material such as newspapers and comics are stored in boxes constructed at our Sighthill Preservation Services Unit. The material used is known as archival folding boxboard which gives the material stored in the box a healthy acid free micro climate storage environment. However, if items are damaged when they arrive in the Library, they will be sent to our Conservation Workshop for repair.

downthetubes: How do you deal with the modern habit of cover mounted free gifts and comics issued in plastic bags because of these gifts?

John: We have certain criteria for keeping items attached to any serial we receive. Obviously we can’t leave anything attached to the item for conservation reasons so some free gifts are removed and stored separately. The more ephemeral items are disposed of as there is no practical way of keeping or cataloguing them.

downthetubes: Do the public have access to the collection?

John: Yes, the public can access any item in the collection in our reading room in George IV Bridge, Edinburgh. You can find out which titles we have by looking in our catalogue at main-cat.nls.uk. To consult an item, you will need to have a readers’ ticket and details on how to apply can be found on our website.

Local Heroes Poster downthetubes: How did the Local Heroes exhibition come about?

John: The library sets out a program of exhibitions sometime in advance -- 2012 is due to be looked at soon. The idea came up at an exhibition planning meeting a couple of years ago. The exhibition team really liked it and thought there were numerous possible stories to tell so it was pencilled in.

There were added bonuses: it was a rare opportunity to showcase our modern and contemporary collections, which come into NLS through legal deposit in huge volume every year but which rarely get put on display; the highly visual and colourful nature of the material made it ideally suited for exhibition; and finally, it would, we hoped, attract visitors to NLS who might never have been to the Library before.

downthetubes: How did you get involved with the Local Heroes exhibition?

John: I became involved with the exhibition because I used to work in the Legal Deposit Unit which was given the task of coming up with the content of the exhibition. The unit is the principle point of entry for modern UK monographs coming into the library (we process over 1,000 books a week not to mention serials). The Head of Legal Deposit, Robert Betteridge (now retired), and I began looking at titles in the weekly intake. We began photocopying the covers to give us a feel for any patterns that might emerge on which we could elaborate a story.

Originally there were a lot of Superhero type books, critical works about comics, how artists are using the medium, their influence on film, their increasing use in schools etc. But this was fairly loose and as the exhibition was three or four years down the line we didn’t have time to pin it down at that point.

As other projects in the unit began to eat up large amounts of time, consideration was given to a guest curator doing the exhibition, or that a touring exhibition could be brought in. However, this proved a non-starter and I volunteered to take on a lead role as I had some experience of actually reading comics and graphic novels, though in no way an expert.

Kidnapped art by Cam Kennedy on display at the Local Heroes exhibition

downthetubes: How were the limits of the exhibition's coverage defined?

John: I was very lucky I think. The only limits I can remember was one of cost; word limits for the panels (the writing of which took ages because each panel had a limit of 150 words which is a lot harder to do than it sounds); and it had to show our Cam Kennedy Kidnapped artwork.

Our exhibitions officer, Jackie Cromarty, was pretty open about how things could be done. She liked the initial ideas and made suggestions for others but in the main she trusted what we were doing. I didn’t go away and read Exhibitions for Dummies but it was evident that we would need some kind of story to involve people. Because the medium is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance I felt it would be good to show writers and artists doing different things. So this was my starting point. I didn’t want to explicitly say the medium has grown up because it had already been changing for more than thirty years, but putting it more into a historical context seemed a good way to go to contrast the old with the new. I also felt that the general public’s perception of the medium was a bit in the past and could do with being brought up to date.

However the growing up theme is an easily understood one if you are tackling the general public perception of the medium. Some might find it a bit trite because we are already past that stage but I reasoned that people coming to the exhibition who already believed in the value of the medium didn’t need convincing. It was those that might not believe in the value of the medium I was hoping to convert. But you also want to give something to those people who do have an understanding of the medium. So I also tried to include a variety of items that they might not know about or be pleasantly surprised by.

This helped decide at which level to pitch at. I limited myself to a general overview in order to appeal to the widest possible group of people. When you go down the road from the general to the specific you run the risk of being too critical and subjective which is not the role of the library. We collect everything from children’s books to scientific texts without any bias, other than to try and collect Scottish material comprehensively. It is the people making use of the collections that bring interpretation; our job is as a catalyst to facilitate access to material for this.

You also have at the back of your mind that while you are showcasing a subject you are also promoting the library and its collections. I chose to limit myself to things that were actually in the library’s collections, rather than borrowing material from other places such as the British Library. Then anything that proved interesting for someone, they could come in and read it. Specifically I wanted to whet people’s appetite to actually seek out and read the titles on display, not just to view them as dead specimens under glass.

downthetubes: What comics did you read when you were growing up and did they influence your choices for the exhibition?

John: Borrowing Asterix and Tintin from the local library when I was seven or eight started my love of reading and comics. And I still think their format is one of the best utilised. I don’t remember many weeklies other than the revived Eagle (especially The Tower King - come on with the reprints, Hibernia!). There were Commando comics at my Gran’s house and the Dandy and Beano in a similar format. But it was buying old annuals down the Barras Market in Glasgow - Beano, Dandy, Topper, Beezer, Broons, Oor Wullie, Warlord, Victor and Battle – that provided most of my comic fun.

Later I found a 2000AD annual which reprinted a Future Shock where a small alien creature gets shot by hunters after opening like a scene from Bambi. I rushed out to buy 2000AD weekly and hit a rich vein of art and stories like Slaine - The Horned God and Chopper - Song of the Surfer. Specialist comic shops then introduced me to Akira, Sandman, Cholly and Flytrap, Chevel Noir and Heavy Metal. However, once I started collected editions of Cerebus I kind of stopped buying comics as I prefer to read things like Y: the Last Man, Bone and the Walking Dead in story arcs rather than chapters every month.

Some of what I’ve read recently, Fun Home, Blankets and Persepolis, never came out as a serialised story anyway. The way people read comics is changing and that is something I wanted to show in the exhibition. This leaves out one significant aspect – superheroes. I’m not a fan. But the success of Scottish writers and artists in the big US superhero titles also meant that they weren’t being omitted just because they are not to my taste.

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