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About

• Introduction
• The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera
• The Project
• What's online now?
• Access to the John Johnson Collection in the UK
• Feedback

Introduction

The John Johnson Collection is the product of a unique partnership between the Bodleian Library and ProQuest to conserve, catalogue and digitise more than 65,000 items drawn from the Bodleian's John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera. The project, which has been funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through its Digitisation Programme, will broaden access to a wide array of rare or unique archival materials documenting various aspects of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera

Housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the John Johnson Collection is widely recognised as one of the most important collections of printed ephemera in the world and generally regarded as the most significant single collection of ephemera in the UK. It was assembled by John de Monins Johnson (1882-1956), Printer to the University, who was visionary in his preservation of Britain's vulnerable paper heritage. It contains a wide array of rare and unusual materials, which has remained largely unknown to scholars and researchers.

For information about gaining access to the original collection, please visit the John Johnson Collection pages of the Bodleian Library web site.

The Project

The material selected for conservation, cataloguing and digitisation comprises a wide array of different types of printed document, including posters and handbills for theatrical and non-theatrical entertainments, broadsides relating to murders and executions, book and journal prospectuses, popular topographical prints, and a wealth of different kinds of printed advertising material. The resulting online collection will form an invaluable resource for researchers interested in the histories of consumption, leisure, gender, popular culture, commerce, technology, crime, and a host of other areas. With each item presented as a full-colour, high-resolution facsimile, the John Johnson Collection will also be indispensable for researchers studying the development of printing and visual culture in modern Britain.

On completion the John Johnson Collection will offer access to more than 65,000 documents (in excess of 150,000 high-resolution colour images) and will consist of five different categories of material:

• Nineteenth-Century Entertainment - which falls into two distinct groups: theatre material and non-theatrical entertainment material. Both categories provide a wealth of insights into nineteenth-century leisure activities, popular and high culture (especially the performing arts), and the development of different types of entertainment.
• The Booktrade - examples include publishing material (e.g. prospectuses of books and journals) and bookplates. The former will be of interest to anyone studying the history of the publishing industry, or the reception of certain kinds of thought or learning during the period; the latter will prove invaluable to those interested in the provenance of books, or in design history.
• Popular Prints - these items provide an invaluable record of locations and landscapes, architecture, popular tastes and appetites for artistic works and topography.
• Crime, Murders, and Executions - a mixture of single sheets and pamphlets that afford unique insights into the judicial system and its punishments, notably the application of the death penalty and of transportation. The Murders and Executions broadsides are currently much used in a variety of research areas (e.g. women and crime, woodcut iconography)
• Advertising - social and economic historians, historians of popular culture, trades and industries, students of typographic design and many others will find that these items provide an invaluable insight into the development of consumerism.

Cataloguing of the digital surrogates has been undertaken by dedicated specialist staff based at the Bodleian Library.

What's online now?

The John Johnson Collection currently provides access to facsimile images of more than 22,600 items (a total of 59,463 images), including more than 10,300 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category and more than 3,000 items from the Booktrade category. Over 2,400 Popular Prints are now available in facsimile form, along with more than 6,400 items from Advertising and over 400 from Crimes, Murders and Executions.

More than 31,100 catalogue records are available in this release. Note that catalogue records are added to the John Johnson Collection in advance of the facsimile images to which they relate. Users wishing to restrict searches to items for which facsimile images are currently available should use the checkbox positioned above the Keyword(s) field on the Search: All screen and on the three category-specific search screens (Entertainment, Booktrade and Advertising) to exclude records without images from their results.

More catalogue records and facsimile images will be made available in forthcoming releases of the John Johnson Collection. The completed collection (65,000 items comprising c. 150,000 images) will be available by mid-2009.

Access to the John Johnson Collection in the UK

The John Johnson Collection has been created with support from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through its Digitisation Programme, and is available free of charge to all UK universities, further education institutions, schools and public libraries.

If you live in the UK and your library does not already provide access to the John Johnson Collection, please ask your librarian to complete the sign-up form and return it to ProQuest at the address specified.

Please note that it is not possible to gain access to the John Johnson Collection other than via your university, college, school or public library. ProQuest is unable to respond to requests for access from individual UK users.

Feedback

The Bodleian Library and ProQuest welcome feedback on the John Johnson Collection. Please contact us with your comments and queries.