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Guide to the Toole-Stott Circus Collection, ca. 1886-1970
PA Mss 14
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Title: Toole-Stott Circus Collection,
Date (inclusive): ca. 1886-1970
Collection number: PA Mss 14
Creator: Toole-Stott, Raymond, 1910-1982
Extent: 42 boxes (26 lf)
Repository:
University of California, Santa Barbara. Library. Dept. of Special Collections
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Shelf location: For current information on the location of these
materials, please consult the library's online catalog.
Abstract: Collection of author Raymond Toole-Stott, author of
Circus and Allied Arts: A World Bibliography.
Collection includes correspondence, monographs, book drafts, printed ephemera and scrapbooks relating to the circus.
Language:
English.
Library Purchase, 1972.
None.
Copyright has not been assigned to the Department of Special Collections, UCSB. All requests for permission to publish or
quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Head of Special Collections. Permission for publication is given
on behalf of the Department of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply
permission of the copyright holder, which also must be obtained.
[Identification of item], Toole-Stott Circus Collection, PA Mss 14, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries,
University of California, Santa Barbara.
This collection was assembled by Raymond Toole-Stott (1910-1982), British author, journalist and compiler of the multi-volume
Circus and Allied Arts: A World Bibliography, as well as other writings on the circus, conjuring, and Somerset Maugham. Toole-Stott also worked as a free-lance journalist
for twenty years, eight of which he spent as the Chief Feature writer to Bertram Mills Circus at Olympia. During a few seasons
in the 1930s, he managed a circus on his own.
Among his other credits, Toole-Stott was the founder and original editor of the
Sawdust Review, a precursor to the British circus journal
King Pole. Recognized as the pre-eminent historian/bibliographer on the circus, he spent the later part of his life collecting numerous
books related to the circus, while compiling and writing his four-volume bibliography. Toole-Stott's accomplishments as a
scholar and circus aficionado are particularly notable, considering that he worked full time in the Treasury Solicitor's office
as a civil servant. Prior to his death in 1982, he had started to write the fifth volume in
Circus and Allied Arts series, which has since been published posthumously.
The collection consists of a manuscript component and a larger book collection of several hundred volumes, both of which are
housed in Special Collections.
The manuscript holdings have been partially arranged and described. The following is a preliminary box level inventory of
the collection.