It's probably all thanks to John Bell that all those Bell Features books are in the Archive. When you're accessing them, you're accessing them for research not commercial use. There's a lot of legislation about this.
There are other archives and libraries in Canada that have some of this material--but they don't always take such good care of it. The Maple Leaf stuff that I read at the Vancouver Archives is just in a folder. I had to agree not to share any of the material that they photo-copied for me. Haven't accessed that archive in a long while, so I don't know the state of the comics now, but there wasn't extraordinary efforts taken to preserve them when I was there.
And I used to work in a library, in my student days, so I saw what extraordinary efforts could be taken by libraries and archives when they cared about the material in their collections.
In the UBC Special Collections, there was more comics--Maple Leaf, Bell and others. But they did an even worse job of preserving the comics. I kept my contact with those materials to the minimun because some comics were literally falling apart in my hand when I looked at them and I was being extremely careful. It pained me to see such comics left to the elements like a pile of leaves in the fall, crumbling to dust. I didn't bother to request photo-copies, because doing so would have destroyed the remains of these comics.
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Topic: Goldenage Canadian Comics (Read 8350 times)
