British Library theatrical playbills 1600-1902

BL Playbills collection

blplaybills.org is a research tool to find and view playbills (theatre posters) from some collections of the British Library's theatrical playbills.

It does not contain everything the Library has to offer, but has access to about 80,000 playbills made available by the Library under a Creative Commons license.

These include playbills digitised from over 500 physical volumes of theatrical English, Scottish, and Irish playbills between 1600 and 1902 (mostly 19th century).

Playbill text was created using optical character recognition (OCR) software. This text can be quite rough, but it can be searched to quickly find individual playbills using simple text searches.

The results provide access to a high resolution image of the individual playbill, and the OCR text of the contents.

The search can be filtered to narrow the results.

It is also possible to copy the OCR text, as well as view/download a high resolution copy of the image.

Search for BL playbills

Enter search text above to find playbills that contain that text.

Click the 'Match phrase' checkbox to match an exact phrase.

If matches are found, a grid of matching playbills appear.

A second panel appears to refine the results by date, location, organisation, theatre and British Library volume number.

Each result card contains:

Button to get a high resolution copy of the image
Button to copy OCR text to the clipboard
Low resolution image of the playbill (click to open a high resolution copy of the image)
Theatre, if known
Location of theatre
Date range playbill published
The volume/shelf mark
A short extract of the OCR text of the content
Click on the verical dots () to see a scrollable view of the whole text

The results can be filtered by:

Date range
Location
Organisation
Theatre
Volume

Latest Updates

October 2024

Addition of a 'match phrase' checkbox:

Select this to only return results that match a complete phrase
No need to put quotes in the phrase to search for
The search ignores case, so mixed case and all caps versions of the phrase will match

Improvements to the user interface when filtering results:

When a facet is selected from the menus on the left, a "chip" for the facet is shown below the search bar
The facet menus update to reflect the filtered result set; this fixes a bug where irrelevant facets were still shown in the menus
To remove a filter from the results, click the 'X' on the chip and the filter is removed

BL playbills, front page image for blplaybills.org

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