You think it's a pain to keep track of the comics in your collection? Hah!

One of the biggest challenges in a collection is maintaining a list of what you have -- or, as Don used to say, the difference between a collection and an accumulation is an index. So one of the jobs staffers face at the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library (27 W. 17th Ave. Mall, Columbus -- (614) 292-0539, usually open Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. -- just thought it was time to remind everyone) is maintaining the inventory.

When Carolyn Kelly and I visited the facility, we spent some of the time trying to help -- and I intend to go again for such things in the future. What Carolyn is doing here is what we both did: enter inventory information for some of the Sunday comic strips in the collection. For example, I started with Thimble Theatre Sunday strips from 1940. I pulled the envelope marked for the strip for 1940, pulled out the strips in the envelope, and set them next to the white sheet with a year's worth of daily grid. I noted the credited creators and year and rough dimensions (in cm.) of the majority of the strips in the envelope, then pencilled an "X" in the dates on the strip, and noted anything unusual at the bottom of the sheet. (For example, one strip was unsigned. Another needed a repair.) The completed folder and its sheet was set aside, and the next envelope was opened.

(By the way, finding the date was sometimes a challenge. On the Sundays, an installment date was sometimes determined by a date on the strip on the back of the inventoried strip.)

Our hands were clean and ungloved. Much of the collection is handled only with white gloves, but potential damage from snagging frail newsprint edges is greater from gloves than from bare hands. It's detail-driven, painstaking work, but the results are the difference between a collection and an accumulation.