The importance of the study of popular culture has been increasingly emphasised, certainly since the 1960s, until it has emerged as a wide‐ranging and academically respectable discipline. The social and psychological influence of popular culture exists by definition, whether as a background to or influence on the more classical “mainstream” culture, or as a study in its own right, as a vital component of social history. Another influence has been, in more recent years especially, the expansion of the market for an ever wider range of “collectables”, many of them manifestations of popular culture: children’s literature and detective fiction in particular have a long and respectable history within book collecting, but comics, toys and other similar items now have their own established collectors’ markets.
Happy, and especially blessed, is the pioneer collector in such fields. Barry Ono (the stage name of Frederick Valentine Hanson 1876‐1941) was a music‐hall artist and a pioneer collector of penny novels and magazines, a fascinating character who merits the form of immortalisation bestowed by Helen R. Smith’s excellent introduction to this catalogue. He was both collector and dealer, although much (indeed most) detail of his activities has been lost and even though the collection surviving in the British Library (donated to the British Museum Library after its rejection by the Museum of London) offers positive insights, there are negative indications too since some (possibly significant and perhaps fairly substantial) material was lost to damp in the basement after his removal from his house at Clapham Common, and only discovered too late in the 1960s.
The offer of the donation of the collection was made in October 1941, an inventory was made on 12 January 1942 and on 17 January the British Museum asked for the books to be sent to it for closer examination. Only in October 1948 was the collection formally accepted and accessioned and then first examined in 1950 by Professor Louis James during his research into working‐class fiction. Entries for the collection were made in the General Catalogue of 1968, but this new volume is the first fully descriptive catalogue. All this information (and more) is given in a fascinating introduction, which opens with a biography of Barry Ono and his collecting activities and continues with a review of the penny dreadful genre: history, format, authors, illustrators, relationships to the theatre, moral disapproval and study and bibliography. Two items written by Ono about his collection are reprinted (a poem ‐ or at least verse ‐ and extracts from an essaay of 1935).
The catalogue itself forms the bulk of the book and is separately and fully introduced, where difficulties in cataloguing the genre are explained. The works are meticulously catalogued and presented. A total of 704 items are arranged alphabetically by authors (where stated or identified with any certainty) or by titles, in a single sequence. Standard bibliographic data include pagination, illustrations and height of each volume, supplemented by annotations which include publishing background information, notes on contributors, or on the individual copy; precedence is given to authorship information. It is stressed that this is a catalogue of the items as they are present in this collection: there will be in existence other copies of the same works where the covers or other details will differ. British Library pressmarks are also quoted, as are microfilm references (to encourage use of the substitute rather than the rare and fragile original copies). Three separate indexes list names and titles, illustrators and engravers, and publishers and printers. The book is illustrated throughout with reproductions from the material catalogued.
The importance of this catalogue in various respects is considerable. It is a scholarly contribution to the study of a genre of writing of enormous popular significance in its own time and which also influenced many “literary” authors as well as leading to further developments in popular publishing. The availability of such information will encourage a wider range of scholars and modern collectors to access the source material, particularly since it is available in microfilm, and so stimulate further study and knowledge. That, as has been said so often elsewhere, is very much within the mission of the British Library to make its holdings more accessible, both physically and intellectually. Finally, it is also a fitting monument to a notable collector, primarily as a collector in the catalogue, but also to a fascinating and otherwise largely unremembered character. A kind of immortality is thus conferred on him, a notion which might also attract other collectors as potential benefactors.
