Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
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| Country | USA |
|---|---|
| Type | Research library |
| Scope | Comic art |
| Established | 1977 |
| Location | Columbus, Ohio |
| Coordinates | 40°00′04″N 83°00′32″W / 40.001°N 83.009°WCoordinates: 40°00′04″N 83°00′32″W / 40.001°N 83.009°W |
| Branch of | Ohio State University Libraries |
| Other information | |
| Director | Jenny E. Robb, Curator and Associate Professor Lucy Caswell, Founder and former Curator Wendy Pflug, Associate Curator and Assistant Professor Caitlin McGurk, Associate Curator for Outreach and Assistant Professor |
| Website | cartoons.osu.edu |
The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is a research library of American cartoons and comic art affiliated with the Ohio State University library system in Columbus, Ohio. Formerly known as the Cartoon Research Library and the Cartoon Library & Museum, it holds the world's largest and most comprehensive academic research facility documenting and displaying original and printed comic strips, editorial cartoons and cartoon art. The Museum is named after the Ohio cartoonist Billy Ireland.
Covering comic books, daily strips, Sunday strips, editorial cartoons, graphic novels, magazine cartoons and sports cartoons, the collection includes 450,000 original cartoons, 36,000 books, 51,000 serial titles and 3,000 feet (910 m) of manuscript materials, plus 2.5 million comic strip clippings and tear sheets.
The Cartoon Library began in 1977 when the Milton Caniff Collection was donated to Ohio State and delivered to the School of Journalism, which was headed by Lucy Shelton Caswell, who became the Milton Caniff Reading Room first curator. Interviewed by Matt Tauber, Caswell detailed the Museum's origins and how she became involved:
From two classrooms off the back hallway of the Journalism Building in 1977, the collection expanded to three classrooms and became part of the University Libraries. By 1989, the three classrooms were filled, and the Library moved into a larger space, eventually requiring the use of off-site storage as the collection continued to expand. (At that point, the facility was named the Cartoon Research Library.)
In 1992, United Media donated the Robert Roy Metz Collection of 83,034 original cartoons by 113 cartoonists.
In 1998, the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection was acquired from its director, Bill Blackbeard, giving the library the largest collection of newspaper comic strip tear sheets and clippings in the world. Six semi-trailer trucks transported this collection from California to Ohio.
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