Posters From The Alan and Thomas Suddon Collection

When I started working at the Marilyn & Charles Baillie Special Collections Centre on the 5th floor of the Toronto Reference Library earlier this year, one of the first things that really caught my eye was the Alan and Thomas Suddon Collection: approximately 5,000 posters, broadsides and flyers advertising everything from businesses to protests to concerts to...well, pretty much anything you could publicize via pieces of paper stapled to a telephone pole. Taken as a whole, it's a fascinating cross-section of social, political and cultural trends in Toronto between the 1950s and early 1990s, especially the downtown, university-dominated Annex area.

Alan Suddon was the head of the Fine Art Department at the Reference Library for many years before he retired in 1987, and he and his son Thomas roamed the streets of Toronto for decades, searching for interesting posters to add to their collection. Thomas passed away in 1992 and Alan in 2000, and shortly after Alan's death, his wife Mary donated the collection to the library. All of the posters are now stored in the Special Collections Centre at the Reference Library, where they are available to be viewed by anyone upon request. They're organized chronologically, so ask for the year you're interested in and a box with all of the posters from that time will be brought out for you to look at.

It would be impossible to truly convey the full variety of the posters held in the Suddon Collection in a single blog post, but here's a little sampling to give you an idea (click on the photos for a larger view).

Left to right:

A screening of the film The Chelsea Girls, directed by Andy Warhol, at the Royal Ontario Museum Theatre (1968) Advertisement for Rodent Skateboards (1988) "Hong Kong Disco Contest" (1978) Theatrical production of The Capitalist Corporate Mind Machine, at the Actor's Lab Theatre (1991)

International Women's Day March (1982) "A Nice Happening" at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall (1973) El Mocambo nightclub concert calendar, including listings for Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley and Charles Mingus (fall/winter 1974)









Moving notice for Bakka Science Fiction Book Shoppe, now known as Bakka Phoenix (1973) The Rivoli nightclub concert calendar, including listings for The Kids In The Hall and The Cowboy Junkies (August 1987)