On April 17th, 2015, Jason Vanderhill donated a compilation of materials to RBSC that thereafter became the Al Sens Collection.1 Vanderhill is a transplant to Vancouver hailing from Ontario. During business hours, he works for the Canadian Federal Government, evenings and weekends he “acts as an archivist for Vancouver, documenting and blogging images, photographs, paintings and curios of the city.”2 He makes artistic archival Vancouver material available on his popular website, Illustrated Vancouver, and is active on various social media platforms. More recently, he has also started up a blog about all things transit, and not just Vancouver transit: TransLinked. How exactly Al Sens came to pass on a portion of his professional records to Vanderhill I was not able to discover, however it’s no surprise Vanderhill then made Sens’s documents physically accessible at UBC’s archives, RBSC.
By May, the donated documents had been categorized, catalogued, labelled, and filed by an archivist, and an accompanying Finding Aid was produced outlining the contents. The Al Sens Collection spans Sens’s career from the 1950s to the 2010s and is split into two series. The publication series features periodicals, brochures, catalogues, programmes, and bulletins (the kind of ephemera Twyman reminds us count as “text” just as much as any “book”4) – sometimes in their entirety, sometimes as clippings or photocopies – collected by Sens or featuring Sens’s work. The original illustration series, as the name suggests, features Sens’s original cartoons, animations, and occasional paintings, both personal and professional.
- “Fonds RBSC-ARC 1729 – Al Sens collection.” RBSC/OSC Archives. UBC, n.d. Web. 8 Mar. 2016. http://rbscarchives.library.ubc.ca/index.php/al-sens-collection.
- Glover, Jillian. “Citymaker: Jason Vanderhill (aka Illustrated Vancouver).” This City Life. n.p. 28 Jan. 2013. Web. 10 Apr. 2016. http://thiscitylife.tumblr.com/post/41712437944/citymaker-jason-vanderhill-aka-illustrated
- The image caption on Vanderhill’s website reads: “A vintage Vancouver neighbourhood (possibly near Eveleigh St, before the Bentall Centre was built in 1966, or perhaps the West End) by independent animator Al Sens, painted circa 1960. He founded his own studio, Al Sens Animation, in Vancouver in 1958. Believed to be purchased at an auction led by the Pappas family, possibly around 1990?”
- From my last post, where I quoted: Twyman, Michael. “What is Printing?” The Broadview Reader in Book History. Ed. Michelle Levy and Tom Mole. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2015. 37-44. Excerpt from The British Library Guide to Printing. London: British Library, 1998. 8-17. Print.
- Sens, Al. Old Houses. circa 1955. Al Sens Collection. RBSC-ARC 1729, box 3, folder 6. Rare Books and Special Collections, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.