The Heritage Camera Collection is comprised of cameras, mainly from the Wilhem E. Nassau Camera Collection, the Irving G. Rumney fonds, and several other small, individual donations.

This collection traces the evolution of the tools of popular photography from the turn of the nineteenth century to the current digital age. Many of the cameras were manufactured by Kodak Canada or Eastman Kodak, but there are also examples from many other manufacturers, such as: Ernst Leitz, Minox, Polaroid, Nikon, Rollei, Mamiya, Olympus, Contax, and several companies that pre-date, and were eventually amalgamated into Kodak, including the Rochester Optical Company.

Items in the collection are arranged in series according on their form and function; the categories are based on the research and publications of Michel Auer and Todd Gustavson, and often overlap chronologically.

Series are as follows:

Early cameras
Dry plate cameras
Field cameras
Folding (bellows) cameras
Box and snapsot roll film cameras
Detective cameras
Panoramic cameras
Miniature and sub-miniature cameras
Single lens reflex cameras
Twin lens reflex cameras
35mm cameras
In-camera processing (instant) cameras
Point and shoot caemras
One-time-use cameras
Digital and pre-digital cameras
Toy and promotional cameras
Motion-picture cameras
Video cameras

To browse the series, click on the "View the list" link under the "See the sous-fonds, series or sub-series lists for this collection" title (to the right of the page).

The collection consists of a large number of studio portrait photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in carte-de-visite or cabinet card formats. There is a large collection of landscape and industrial imagery dating from the Victorian era to the 1960s. The collection also comprises many vernacular photographic albums, good examples of glass and metal photographic processes including cased daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes. The fonds is comprised of the following 8 series: Portraits (sub-series for Groups and Celebrities), Vernacular Photography (amateur snapshots), Landscapes and Industry (sub-series for Slides), Albums, the A.T. Orr collection and a Miscellaneous group of images which were generally created in mixed media.

Collection consists of theatre programs from Great Britain and Ireland, Broadway venues in New York, and from various theatres in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, including the Shaw and Stratford Festivals. Opera and symphony programmes are also included in this collection.

To browse the individual items in this series, click on the "View the list" link under the "See the sous-fonds, series or sub-series lists for this collection" title (to the right of the page).

Collections contains historical and contemporary books on the history of Toronto, featuring tourist guides and souvenirs from the city form the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

All books are catalogued on our library catalogue: https://library.torontomu.ca/. Search "Robert MacIntosh" and narrow down TMU location to Special Collections.

Collection contains books created by the winners of the First Edition Book Award. The Award was established to honor 3rd year photography students who have made exceptional achievements in photobook production. It provides incentive for them to achieve early recognition that will have a lasting legacy in our collection.

As part of MPS507, a 3rd year Image Arts class in The Photographic Book, students are expected to conceive of and create their own book. This is, in part, related to work that has been completed in the co-requisite class, MPS506 - Photographic Production. These are both required courses for the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Image Arts) Photography Studies Option.

The Award was established in 2015, enabling the Library to annually purchase the top five books in the class, as judged by the professor, and the Special Collections Librarian. Books are judged at the year end exhibition of the books and evaluation is focused particularly on design, sequencing, and integration of images and text.

Winning books are catalogued in the TMU Library system, including a note about the award, and housed in Special Collections. Occasional exhibits are created to showcase the works.

2015 Winners:
Rebecca Zynomirski, Sheila's Tropical Vacation (Toronto: Rebecca Zynomirski, 2014). TR655.Z96 2014
Lodoe Laura Haines, Stateless / Photographs by Lodoe Laura, forward by Tashi Wangdi (Toronto: Lodoe Laura, 2014).
Evan Hutchinson, 43.7000 79.4000 (Toronto: Evan Hutchinson, 2014).
Lucy Lu, Memories of Nowhere : A book by Lucy Lu (Toronto: Lucy Lu, 2014).
Imogen Wallis-Mayer, An Ambiguous Form (Toronto, Imogen Wallis-Mayer, 2014).
Emily Pleasance, My Relative Life : A Mapping of Memories (Toronto, Emily Pleasance, 2014)
Kristina Smith, Orillia: A Photographic Exploration (Toronto, Kristina Smith, 2013).

2016 Winners:
Andrea Chartrand, Save As. (Toronto: Andrea Chartrand, 2015).
Kayla Blaze Kelley, Dear Dad. (Toronto: Kayla Blaze Kelley, 2015).
Mina Markovic, Komplikovani Identiteti. (Toronto: Mina Markovic, 2015).
Terence Reeves, Looking Outside Looking In. (Toronto: Terence Reeves, 2015).
Gabriel Steele, Jackson. (Toronto: Gabriel Steele, 2015).
Alia Youssef, Self-portraits of my Family in our Backyard. (Toronto: Alia Youssef, 2015).

2017 Winners:
Adrian Walton-Cordeiro – Comtesse De Bertren
Ailene Devries – Two Cities and a River
Fehn Foss – Remembering, Faring
Julia Garnet – Elements
Feline Gerhardt – About Mankind and the Attempt to Increase Significance
Warren Rynkun – The Yard

2018 Winers:
After Grapefruit, Clea Christakos-Gee
Untitled, Raelene Giffin
In Nocte, Rafaela Conde
Into the Water, Lisa McElroy
9869518588, Heather Rattray
Home and Glory, Kalen Huxhan
It’s Good Once You Get There, Hayley Wilsdon

2019 Winners
How to Run Away, Lucy Alguire
Istanbul, Neha Bokhari
Playful urban drifts : a set of instructions for the urban wanderer, Bahar Kamali
Cowboy, Austen Ambraska
Shallow Season, Ally Ambler
Overdressed, Jared Miller

2020 Winners
Metamorphosis by Julie Ng, 2019
Interplay of light by Jordana Petruccelli, 2019
Biotypes by Gabrielle Tyrie, 2019
Two minutes of Progress Avenue by Austin Wadell, 2019
The disposable Glitch series by Teagan Lopes, 2019
Surveillance culture by Yarden Haddie, 2019
The death of an industry, the death of a generation : the state of the Canadian auto industry by Samuel Toward, 2019

2021 Winners
My Mennonite Mother, by Sarah Bauman, 2020
No, You, by Freida Wang, 2020
You, the Light & Nothing Else, by Christina Oyawale, 2020
Right Here, Right Now, by Dein Squires-Rouse, 2020
Mapping Colour, by Abygail De Leon, 2020
Plant Kingdom, by Zongzhe Cai, 2020
Fag, by Tyler Da Silva, 2020
I Beg You To Have Patience, by Caeden Wigston, 2020

2022 Winners:
Back Book, by Pengxiang Zhou, 2021
Shrieking sisterhood, by Kayla Ward, 2021
The Paper, by Kayla Ward, 2021
Calm and Chaos, by Kay Nadjiwon, 2021
Rosemary and Thyme, by Katya Lina, 2021
Need me, by Peyton Keeler Cox, 2021
Meu Avo, by Andrew Moreno, 2021
Bring back ice to the lake, by Yixuan Mark Wang, 2021

2023 Winners:
Forget Me not by Jessica Berger, 2022
More Than Someone's Daughter : She is Someone by Kennedy Soong Bouchard, 2022
To us, my love by Alec Boyle, 2022
Nightmares by Bella Della Penna, 2022
Pockets of Haven by Rahim Perez-Anderson, 2022

This collection consists of early optical devices commonly known as magic lanterns. The first report of the construction of a magic lantern is generally considered to be referring to the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens in 1659. The lanterns in this collection are dated from the early 1800s until the mid 1900s and include large professional devices as well as consumer models and toy magic lanterns.

The collection also holds over 500 lantern slides on a wide range of subjects. The slides demonstrate different iterations of glass slide projection and the evolution from hand-painted imagery to photographic and mechanical slides.

For more information about the history of magic lantern projection, please see our blog post: https://library.ryerson.ca/asc/2017/10/new-exhibition-projecting-magic/

The Collingwood collection contains 35mm, 120mm and 4x5 negatives as well as prints and color slides. Grant Collingwood photographed Toronto from 1940s to 1990s. The collection consists of photographs of jazz musician, street views of Toronto, events and trade fairs, weddings, architecture and the office culture. Additionally, there are photographs of manufacturers and machinery.

This collection contains Canadian cookbooks and textbooks with a focus on community created cookbooks, diet and nutrition cook books, high school textbooks, and food company cookbooks and pamphlets.

This collection consists of programs from theatre, opera, and symphony performances that the collector attended from 1952-2020. Most programs have the ticket stub tipped in, and some include newspaper reviews and clippings for the performances.

This collection consists of various issues of the periodical arts review newsletters and fanzines Captain George's Whizzbang, Captain George's Penny Dreadful, and The Ghost Town Gazette. These publications created or edited by Peter Harris between 1968 and 2012. The collection also contains mock up designs that demonstrate the collage method and newspaper clippings used to make the fanzines.

The collection consists of small pamphlets or periodicals issued by camera manufacturers to promote the sale of camera equipment or encourage the use of their films and apparatus. Most issues were published by the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY, but there are a few issues from other Kodak branches and other photographic companies. A couple of fiction stories and comic books on the topic of crime photography are included as well.

Many books on the history of photography were also part of the collection, catalogued in the Ryerson Library database: http://innopac.lib.ryerson.ca/search~S0/X?graver+collection&SORT=AX

This fonds contains published and grey-literature textual records collected by the architect Pamela Cluff and her firm “A.W. Cluff & P.J. Cluff Architects” and used as part of the firm's small reference library. The items in this collection have a strong subject focus on architecture and interior design for elderly and alternately-abled users.

The collection contains books and bound periodicals on the subject of photography. Subjects include instructional guides, process descriptions, art photography, early photographic chemistry and product catalogues. Some publications include tipped in photogrpahs. TThe primary language of the collection is German, with a few Spanish, Russian, Czech, and Japanese publications.
Periodicals include:
Allgemeine Photographische Zeitung (January 1924-December 1926)
Photofreund (1924)
Photofreund Jahrbuch (1924-1934)
Photographische Archiv (1866, 1871-1891)
Photographische Correspondenz (1878, 1889-1908, 1928, 1932, 1947-1951)

The collection consists of more than 800 items featuring the image of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. There is a variety of media, including paper, textile, bronze, alloy, gold, clay, wood, porcelain, stone as well as books, posters, postcards, and 35mm black and white film. The collection was assembled between 1989 and 2003 in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Vilnius and Kaliningrad. The items in the collection have been arranged in the following series: Documentary Films, Posters, Postcards, Books and Periodicals, Records, Pins, Bookplates, Paintings, Rugs and Embroidery, Postage Stamps, Notes, Coins and Commemorative Medals, Sculptures, Reliefs, Flags.

The archive contains thousands of negatives and photographs taken for publication in Canadian Architect magazine. As announced in the magazine's inaugural issue, Canadian Architect reviewed and documented both public and private structures, including churches, homes, businesses, airports, government offices and public spaces. The subjects of the photographs are generally modern Canadian structures, but images of some International sites and early 20th century Canadian buildings can be found in the collection as well. The collection also contains images of entries to the annual national design awards program sponsored by the magazine, the "Awards of Excellence." The collection also functions as a record of the changing nature of magazine production over the latter part of the 20th century. Canadian Architect was the first business publication in Canada to make engravings on site from original photographs, allowing for a rich selection of both prints and negatives. Instructions by editors and layout artists regarding their eventual printing in the magazine are often written directly on the prints, along with photographer's stamps, credit lines or captions.

Fonds consists of audio reels and video tapes (VHS, U-Matic and Betacam) with excerpts of interviews, television shows and specials intended for broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) English Television Network. The tapes were compiled by Paddy Sampson during the course of his employment with the CBC as a television producer.

Fonds consists of 181 comic books, produced in Canada, mainly during World War II, after the War Exchange Conservation Act (WECA), on December 2, 1940 classified American comics as "luxury goods" and limited their importation. These comics are also known as the "Canadian Whites" (due to the fact that the comics were black and white, except for the covers), the comics were published by Commercial Signs of Canada, which consisted of brothers Cyril (Cy) and Gene Bell, with investor John Ezrin. Publication began in the summer of 1941 and included titles Wow Comics, Active Comics, Dime Comics, and Joke Comics. '

In the winter of 1942, Commercial Signs absorbed another publishing house, Hillborough Studios, and renamed the company Bell Features. The acquisition brought the "Triumph Comics" title, and two more, Dizzy Don Detective (later retitled The Funny
Comics), and Commando Comics, soon followed.

When WECA was repealed in June of 1944 and American comic books were once again available to Canadians, Bell Features attempted to remain competitive by expanding their market into the US and the UK, and by publishing some titles in colour. Due to a lack of available newsprint, however, the company shifted its focus on Canadian content and began reprinting American titles.

Source: Scanlon, Meaghan. (10 July, 2015). Written, Drawn and Printed in Canada ---- by Canadians!”
Bell Features, CanCon, and the Perception of Comics in Postwar Canada. Presentation for SHARP Montreal.

This Fonds consists of documentation and promotional materials produced for the annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, calendars and information related to the year-round programming at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema, and various administrative materials associated to the non-profit cultural organization.

The Kodak Canada collection contains records and artifacts from the Kodak Heights manufacturing facility in Toronto, as well as the historical collection belonging to the Kodak Heritage Collection Museum. The collection consists of photographs, negatives, advertising records, magazines, pamphlets, daily record books, recipe books, cameras and other photographic equipment produced by Kodak Canada Inc., or other Kodak plants around the world. The collection includes a small selection of financial records, blueprints for Kodak facilities in Canada, and other corporate ephemera, as well as photographs of events, buildings and individual employees that illustrate the social life of the company.