The Barbarella Library, one year on

It’s been almost a year and the virtual Barbarella library has grown considerably, now at 378 items from around the initial 40 at its release on 30 June 2024. At that point any new deployments of the website with bug fixes or new features only took a minute or so, but today it takes… considerably longer.

The physical library–a glass-windowed cabinet sitting in our main hallway–has grown to around 150 items from when I started back in Sep 2023, but my purchases have mostly stopped during The Year of Italy. Mostly.

Probably the hardest part of organizing the library was your standard librarian-type stuff. It would have been worth it to ask an actual reference librarian to consider the range of source material and come up with a publication identifier system but as it is I was left to my own devices. I had an initial taxonomy and as the library grew my index system had to re-organize. ISBN and UPC codes are obvious choices, but when a book has nothing but a publisher or a flyer has nothing but an event date such “absolute” identifiers are less obvious. The system I eventually came up with has the following rules:

1. ISBN-13:XXXXX including dashes
2. ISBN-10:XXXXX including dashes
3. UPC:XXXXX
4. SKU:XXXXX – Dynamite SKU represents all issue variants while their UPC is different for each
5. EBAY:XXXXX – Value is the eBay item number.
6. {PUBLISHER_IDENTIFIER}:{ID} – publisher ID
7. {PUBLISHER_IDENTIFIER}:{TITLE}:{YEAR}[:{INDEX}]
8. {PUBLISHER_IDENTIFIER}:{TITLE}(:{'PAGE':NUMBER}|:{'PANEL':PAGE_NUMBER:PANEL_INDEX})
9. {PUBLISHER_IDENTIFIER}[:{TITLE}]:'{DRAWING|PANTING|PRINT}':{IDENTIFIER|INDEX}]

Since there are four primary source documents, the `TITLE placeholder above will represent one of those four:

• BARBARELLA
• COLERES
• SEMBLE
• MIROIR

Older additions to the library have a much looser adherence to this system and, as with any library, still need to be re-indexed appropriately. Fun.

A large number of the items in the collection are of dubious interest: short magazine articles, local theater flyers, fanzines, etc. and so when I find something new it’s sometimes difficult to know what to include and what is ephemera. However as soon as you stop becoming a completist the label “library” loses much of its authority. With that to consider, I’ve created some exclusion rules:

• No newer photographic prints of original publicity photos. Even though they are high quality and on good paper, these are more like products of print mills that churn them out in bulk. The originals will often have writing on the front or back, though I don’t really have a good sense of “original”. I need to speak to a movie memorabilia archivist.
• No ads that have been removed from the original magazine (I may bend on that rule if the magazine is unavailable). Even though they are vintage, It seems odd that people try to sell these.
• No self-made artifacts such as buttons or prints. Much like the rule excluding photographic prints, the source of the artifact should be the original publisher such as Paramount for the movies or Le Terrain Vague or Grove Press for the books. This excludes fanzines.
• Artifacts from more culturally distant countries (Turkey, Iran) can be an exception to any of these rules because of their rarity.

Apart from reindexing, I really need cheaper hosting. It’s on AWS (I knooooow) and I can probably cut expenses in half elsewhere. While I’ve cut off a lot of extraneous expenses in my life, I feel that the information should continue to exist because it centralizes and references the sources of disparate memorabilia. It’s a single source of truth. That’s not coming from an inflated sense of the value of the library, but from general respect for and preservation of information. I want to avoid adding more linkrot to the Internet.

Despite said budget, over the last weeks I had been eying a couple of German Barbarella posters from the Jean-Claude Forest era. One poster muted and silly, taken from page 14 panel 1 of the first book; the other vibrant and slyly vulgar, taken from page 33 panel 7. (The former had been used elsewhere to illustrate how many permutations the art would go through to stay just behind what the censors might call out.) Like religious scrolls in Aramaic or Latin, J-CF-era Barbarella and Fonda-era Barbarella have a different proximity to original intent and so the values differ. The movie captures much of the soul but, like any translation of comic-to-screen (and we’ve seen so many in the past 30 years) the mix of timeless adventure and prurience is missing. The comics are Flash Gordon serials. We forgive the absurdity within the artwork but the movie somehow cheapens it.

Here are the original panels from the Le Terrain Vague edition, 1964:

I may-or-may not frame them after they arrive so the purchase feels a little silly. Blame it on being a collector.

They were unexpected purchases but when something rare pops up for sale it’s difficult to resist the urge and the importance of buying it while it still exists to be bought. None of the V Magazine issues I purchased–having searched for them from the start–have shown up since late last year when someone must have decided to dump their collection on eBay. Many of the Barbarella items in the library either were unknown until I found a buried reference to them and so learned specifically that I could look for them (the French magazine Futurs, which serialized the third book, was one such item whose existence I’d only randomed upon) or were simply un-findable, like V Magazine. A rare misstep on my part was finding an item pre-library, saving the image and the URL, but learning later that I copy/pasted the URL wrong (the Forest-Fonteray poster from Galerie 3+2 is currently un-findable). It’s rare these days to experience a product-absence.

Of all of the items that are still out there, mostly posters, there are really only two which are both un-findable and which I would buy immediately if found. One is absurd but would satisfy a completist urge: the Brazilian paperback edition of the first book. It would complete (or would it?) my collection of editions that came out after the movie with movie-related covers. Those include a very rare Swedish edition that was a big score.

The other is a late-era V Magazine issue with chapter 3 from the second book. By the time the second book came out, V Magazine became Voila Magazine and went from 60s cool to 70s trashy. A collector once offered me the first V Magazine Barbarella issue for an absolute steal (a third the price elsewhere), but it was still way too rich for my blood. I accept not having that one but this, if compared to the cost of the other late-era issues, would be in my budget. Un-findable is truly bizarre in this age, but it also make finding that un-findable thing just that much more enjoyable.