Some folk will know that we are heavily into printed transport publicity
ephemera (like 50,000 items heavily).

One of its fascinations is that here is a key resource which most:
librarians disdain for lack of ISBN;
curators disdain because the material is not "hard" enough;
archivists disdain because they are not solo MSS.

Of course there are honourable exceptions to this, but it is a
generality that we would be willing to back up, not least by the
professional interest (or lack of it) shown in our own collection. The
only interest we get in concrete terms comes from enthusiast magazines
willing to commission articles.

Classically, because the institutions have ignored it, it ends up being
left to private individuals (like ourselves) and of course
public/private competition means private collectors should not be
helped. Fiona as a professional librarian and Robert as a curator know
the UK score on this.

So who can answer the question about what became of the British
Transport Commission's own seminal reference collection? Assembled by
Christian Barman and known to exist in the late 1950s (see The Monotype
Recorder Spring 1958), so far our searches have failed to confirm its
survival.

For further information surf our website http://www.forsythe.demon.co.uk
. Any institution or potential patron interested in following up the
synopsis there, is welcome to chat, tho' in those immortal words 'No
Timewasters Please!'.
--
fiona and robert forsythe