A quick message from one of my old places of work, the London School of Economics:
On the campaign trail: help LSE build our election collections
The London School of Economics Archive is collecting election addresses and publicity materials produced by parliamentary candidates in the run-up to May’s general election. Please send them to us at:
Freepost RSHB-UHHY-RTSG
Archives and Rare Books
LSE Library
10 Portugal Street
London WC2A 2HD
The LSE Library has been collecting general election ephemera in this way since 1945. We now hold over 15,000 items covering the whole of the UK which includes material from minority parties and independents as well as the three main parties. Anyone wishing to consult them can find more details about the archive here: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/library/archive/Home.aspx
The LSE prefers leaflets to be sent in batches and have provided a wonderful resource to researchers. It would be great to continue that tradition, especially as when it comes to understanding the impact of leaflets seeing the originals often provides knowledge that doesn’t come from simply looking at electronic versions on screen.



One Comment
I recall the lovely old geezer (name escapes me) who used to run a ramshackle office in the top tower above the National Liberal Club who acted as Librarian, there were some 30,000 political books to look after in the 70s before the rogue De Chablis did his asset-stripping job and flogged off all these relics (mostly ending up at Bristol University), but he collected together a vast collection of election-addresses, going back many years, and was proud of the fact that every single candidate had sent him their official election addresses…there were boxes and boxes of them, going back over several general elections. Wonder what happened to all this stuff. The NLC was a brilliant archive to rummage about on rainy days…