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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the history and contents of an archival resource that is of interest to scholars of historical marketing. The Pirate Group Inc. archive, held by McMaster University Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections consists of over 27,000 sound recordings and 84 metres of textual records, documenting the work of Pirate, an award-winning Toronto-based advertising company founded in 1990. The comprehensiveness of the archives, which includes tens of thousands of advertising “spots”, gives researchers unprecedented access to the creative forces behind some of the most memorable advertisements produced in Canada.

This paper aims to answer the following questions: what is the Pirate Group Inc. and what is their documentary legacy? How can scholars of marketing history benefit from the records contained within the Pirate Group Inc. archive? How can researchers access the material at McMaster University Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections?

The authors assert that the Pirate Group Inc. archive may be of particular interest to scholars engaged in research on the following topics: Canadian nationalism in marketing campaigns, the advertising history of companies whose histories are under-studied due to a lack of archival resources and the recent history of radio and television political ad campaigns.

The paper contributes to historical research in marketing by asserting that the Pirate Group Inc. archive has continuing value for further research. The Pirate archive, which allows for unprecedented access into the study of Canadian advertising due to its comprehensiveness and its uniqueness among archival collections from the contemporary era, makes it a strong primary source for marketing historians.

THERE IS TREASON ABROAD in the world of learning; le trahison des clercs is rising among us today and is more virulent than was the original conspiracy. The current conspiracy is against collections. We are surrounded now by those who are wedded to the University in an unholy sacrament whereby the bride, the shrine of learning, the Library, is being degraded to becoming a mere machine of information that will spew out facts at the touch of a button, facts which are replacing knowledge. There are buildings within our present experience that are called Libraries, wherein books are of minor importance. There are scholars who have told space‐hungry and building‐conscious administrators that electronics and new means of communication have replaced the book as a major matter of the Library. Information has set in.

ALL the auguries for the Bournemouth Conference appear to be good. Our local secretary, Mr. Charles Riddle, seems to have spared neither energy nor ability to render our second visit to the town, whose libraries he initiated and has controlled for thirty‐seven years, useful and enjoyable. There will not be quite so many social events as usual, but that is appropriate in the national circumstances. There will be enough of all sorts of meetings to supply what the President of the A.L.A. describes as “the calling which collects and organizes books and other printed matter for the use and benefit of mankind and which brings together the reader and the printed word in a vital relationship.” We hope the discussions will be thorough, but without those long auto‐biographical speeches which are meant for home newspapers, that readers will make time for seeing the exhibitions, and that Bournemouth will be a source of health and pleasure to all our readers who can be there.

THE RELICS OF A WRITER, his manuscripts, typescripts and memorabilia, have no life of their own, but they give life: they generate and resurrect. Too often they are abused, their products peddled to advance a thesis of no virtue, but this is the nature of things. Yet without them, properly handled, as they should be in an archive, there is no revelation: and not just for scholars either, less for them than for those who love O'Hara. Just a contemplation of them can bring some of him back to those who love and have some inkling of the concern and the care he had for his craft and his creation. He was a concerned man; he had a conscience. He sought and engaged the craft and sullen nature of his gift until it became as much a part of him as his fist. It became as much a part of him as his mind and body; it became his life. No photostat, microform, information retrieval can ever, will ever, replace the true relics, so that the place that holds them becomes for all who need or desire them a singular place, a side altar as well as a memorial. This is both meet and proper, for John O'Hara was a religious writer. He was not unique in this—all good writers are, one way or another—but he was one, especially; a moralist, in a Brooks Brothers shirt, in his bespoke shoes off Peal Brothers. Writing was his rod and his staff. To die in harness, shining in use, was his good luck that we must be thankful for. Requiescat in Pace, as he wrote of Philip Barry, another of them, in his dedication to him of The Farmers Hotel, a book that notched me. O'Hara knew what he was about. He was like one who keeps the deck by night, bearing the tiller up against his breast; he was like one whose soul was centred quite in holding course although so hardly pressed. And veers with veering shock now left now right,

MAN IS HARD TO HANDLE; often he rejects, let alone Gandalf, his God. For as long as man lives all nature and beyond are trying to relate to him, but there is something in Man, both divine and diabolic, that rejects this. When his dark side embraces nature it is to subdue it and harness it to his will. When his good side woos nature it is to excape his manhood and be subject within it. The body's chemistry, land, sea, sun and sky are all directed this way or that. What is eternal in the mind contains this record, but overlords it with a vain and brave attempt, encompassing catastrophe, to break free of his past, to relate or not relate as the will moves, not to share in love, but to control or to cower. Man leaps from ice floe to ice floe, from hummock to tussock, to avoid what the baying may bring forth, what will come from surrender of his will that causes so much woe, and yet without which he would not be.

THE PARLOUR OF ROTA'S OLD BOOKSHOP, Bodley House, in Vigo Street just around the corner from the more commodious present location in Saville Row, London, is where Knox first began to wend its way towards us here in Connecticut. I was sitting there taking something against the cold, buying books for our new institution—this was in the summer of ‘63—when the Knox collection first came up and, as usual, only because I was there at the right and lucky time.’ Leg work is the only way to acquire collections. Bookstores, booksellers are to be visited, not left out in the cold of catalogues. The Rotas, father and son, Bertram and Antony, are the agents who had brought the great Tolkien collection to Marquette University, and almost the Joyce Cary manuscripts, but that's another story. There are libraries all through this North America that have been enriched by a Rota and now it was the turn of Sacred Heart.

EVERYBODY AGREES that shared cataloguing is a good thing, but until recently nobody has done very much about it. I remember my first encounter with it was the regional catalogue for the libraries of South Wales set up in Cardiff in the 1930s under W. O. Padfield, but there was always something rather arcane about it, to me at any rate who was kept shelving books whenever they could find me.

I HAVE NEVER HAD ANY KIND OF AMBITION to become a sort of biographer general to the library profession. But then, as in other parts of my experience, delightfully unexpected things have happened, praise be! Penny Rate has been the only one of my books which has sold even tolerably well: I even fear that there may be something in the assertion made by one member of my staff when, soon after the formation of the Library Association's Library History Group, she said to me: ‘Whether you like it or not, I am afraid that you will go down in library history as the author of Penny Rate.’ Yet I never intended to write the wretched book at all; I only did it because the L. A. asked me to find someone else to do it for the municipal library centenary of 1950.

WE have now to regard Indexing from quite another standpoint. Hitherto we have been assuming it to be undertaken from a co‐operative point of view, as in the case of Poole's Index and also in that of the Review of Reviews. In special work, the greater the magnitude of the task, as in the instance of Science as a whole, and any large divisions of Science, the more likely is co‐operative effort to be required, but speaking generally special indexes are largely the result of individual effort. It is here that that discrepancy in execution, allusion to which has been made earlier, becomes so manifest. It is my principal object to show how these contradictory methods, the natural result of several minds working on no fixed or settled plan, may be avoided. No space, therefore, will be wasted on detailing these inconsistencies, for the reader's and student's interests will be better served by the more positive method of pointing out how to index on a fixed and settled system. As in the previous section practical illustrations will appear later on to demonstrate this.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.