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Explore Your Archive Day 8: #Humour

by Natalie Hayton on 2022-12-01T14:24:04+00:00 | 0 Comments

It's the penultimate day of Explore Your Archive and today and we're sharing our #humour! Always good for a larf, archives are often funny whether we're laughing at hairstyles or #beards from days of yore or gasping in horror/fascination at a 1970s carpeted bathroom! Below are our choice items for today's theme. We hope you find the humour in them too!

Aspirational carpeted bathroom, 1979.

David

I chose this cartoon from The Prism 1931, because I genuinely think it is pretty funny, and, if I were witty enough I could actually make a joke about it being one of the few cartoons in the student magazines that isn't horrendously outdated!

You can browse our indexed catalogue of The Prism here: https://de-montfort.epexio.com/records/D/030/B/01

Like David, Katharine also thought of one of the handful of student magazine cartoons that are suitable for reproduction on a blog!

Katharine

I chose the cartoon below from student magazine, The Tonic, 1935 because I think it is a really neat and witty comment on the double standards surrounding gender and dress.

Catalogue: https://specialcollections.catalogue.dmu.ac.uk/records/D/030/D/01

OOoo and interestingly, we have another bathroom pick!

Marina

I chose this cartoon from Punch, 1937, as I'm someone with a large family where sharing space and other things with siblings was not always welcomed. Fortunately, we did all get to wash with fresh water!

Issues for Punch can be browsed via the Library Catalogue: https://prism.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/dmu/

Natalie

For today, I've chosen this wonderful item from our fashion collections that I always get out for teaching fashion and textile workshops. A bit like marmite, you either love or loathe it -- or at least, are slightly repulsed by it! A textile materials sample book it contains a range of natural and man-made fibres. The pages containing natural fibres from various animals that lived nearly 80 years ago is... thought provoking and sometimes a little aromatic. Laughter often ensues but I'm not sure if its in humour or nervousness now I think about it! Below you can see pages with samples for British wool and Australian wool.