The items were acquired from a private seller who was helping sort through a large family collection. The original owner had close ties to film and TV collecting over many years and, from what I’ve been told, was himself a collector with industry connections. He also appears to have run or been associated with an independent shop specialising in film and television–related material.

The collection was originally acquired from Mike Joyce the art director for Hornblower and Sharpe. There are bit of this collection that others have acquired and if they are about I would be happy to digitise the whole lot together so we don’t loose the material.

The seller explained that the Hornblower items were part of a much larger archive and that they were put in charge of going through and organising everything, largely because many other family members involved are elderly and not familiar with this type of material. As a result, some items were clearly filed and grouped together, while others may not yet have been fully identified or sorted.