Index on Censorship magazine is hosting an auction of Martin Rowson‘s Stripsearch cartoons tomorrow — Tuesday, November 8 — at 6.30pm at the Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London.

The auction will be hosted by the writer and broadcaster Laurie Taylor and admission is free. Contact jo@indexoncensorship.org if you wish to attend. An exhibition of the cartoons will run from tomorrow until December 2. The venue can be contacted on 020-7324 2570.

An exhibition called One Hundred and One Cartoonists is at the Cartoon Museum in London from Thursday 3 November.

It features cartoons, comics and caricatures from the collection of Luke Gertler, who has been collecting original cartoon artwork for more than 50 years.

On display will be works by H.M. Bateman, Max Beerbohm, Giles, David Low, Donald McGill, Thomas Rowlandson, Ronald Searle, John Tenniel and Dudley D. Watkins, among many others.

Asked what drew him to the cartoons he chose for his collection of more than 800 images, Luke Gertler told the Cartoon Museum newsletter:

“With cartoons, it’s the picture I would buy, rather than the joke. I liked ones with people, with characters, and the style was very important to me. I preferred rather bold colour styles, firm outlines like in John Hassall, for instance. I liked also the cartoonists who drew in wonderful detail, like Thelwell and Heath Robinson.”

One Hundred and One Cartoonists runs until January 29. For more details, visit the Cartoon Museum website.

"Tell me about your Big Society ..."

Hard Times, a new exhibition by the Times cartoonist Peter Brookes, opens at the Chris Beetles Gallery in St James’s, London, today and runs until November 5.

The selling show features more than 120 of Brookes’ most recent editorial cartoons from The Times, and ties in with the launch of his new book, also called Hard Times.

To see the exhibition online, go to www.chrisbeetles.com

The Bloghorn is made on behalf of the UK’s Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation

An exhibition of Apparently strips from Private Eye, by the cartoonist Mike Barfield, is being held at the City Screen Picturehouse, York.

The free exhibition, of around 100 strips, opens tomorrow (October 5) and runs for a month.

On Sunday 23 October, Mike will be in the gallery from 1pm onwards selling original artwork — along with some of his music CDs. Bloghorn readers may remember that he wrote a World Cup song last year.

Mike will also be available to answer questions on anything you care to ask him, though he’s not hot on languages or geography. Apparently.

The City Screen is at 13-17, Coney Street, York. Call 0871-902 5726. On November 4, Mike will talk about cartoons and writing, and will perform poems and songs at An Evening With Mike Barfield at the Millennium Hall, Helperby, near York. Tickets are £5. Call 01423-360 364

The Bloghorn is made on behalf of the UK’s Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation

Private Eye celebrates its 50th birthday next month and appears to be in rude health, bucking the downward trend for magazine circulation in the digital age.

The anniversary is October 25 but the celebrations start on Tuesday (September 20) with the release of a new book Private Eye: The First 50 Years, a history of the magazine written by the Eye journalist Adam Macqueen that charts its rise from 300 copies of the first edition in 1961, below, to a fortnightly circulation of more than 200,000.

The book features interviews with key players in the Private Eye story, rare archive material and unseen photos. (There are some “seen” ones too.) And, of course, there is an abundance of the cartoons that are so central to appeal of the magazine.

You can see more of those, including many by members of the PCO, which runs The Bloghorn, when the famously anti-establishment magazine puts on a First 50 Years exhibition at the very establishment Victoria and Albert Museum [Shurely shome mishtake? – Ed]. It opens at the V&A on October 18 and runs until January 8.

Cartoons will be shown in themed sections, on politics, royalty and social observation, and there will be gags, long-running strips and caricatures. The Bloghorn will have more on the exhibition nearer the time.

Ian Hislop, Editor of the magazine, has said of the 50th anniversary: “I do not want anyone to think that this is all just a huge celebration of ourselves. Our 50th year is a chance to look back and take a dispassionate view of how marvellous we are.”

You can read more on how marvellous they are in a Media Guardian article this week and even Vanity Fair is on the case with a piece by Christopher Hitchens. Updates on the 50th anniversary celebrations will appear on the Private Eye at 50 blog.

The Bloghorn is made on behalf of the UK’s Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation

Artwork from the political cartoon collection of Jeffrey Archer is to go on show for the first time, at the Monnow Valley Arts Centre, Herefordshire, from Saturday (September 3).

Image of Power will feature 100 cartoons owned by the writer and former Tory MP who has been collecting cartoons for 25 years. They include this early image of Tony Blair, Has Bambi got teeth?, by Peter Brookes of The Times.

The exhibition, which spans three centuries from Gillray to Scarfe, is being curated by the art collector Chris Beetles. It features images of Churchill, Macmillan, Kennedy, Reagan, Nixon, Thatcher and more.

Lord Archer says on his website: “I continue collecting, as there are still gaps to be filled, but it’s my long-term intention to produce an illustrated book on the collection, and to leave the works to the nation. Mind you, finding a home for them may not prove easy. “

The exhibition will be opened by Lord Archer on Saturday at 3pm and runs until October 30.

Almost as long as Doctor Who has been on — and off — our TV screens he has also been seen in his comics incarnation.

The world’s longest running sci-fi series began in late 1963 and the Doctor first appeared in cartoon form in TV Comic in the following year.

A new exhibition, Doctor Who in Comics: 1964-2011 brings together artwork featuring all eleven Doctors from publications including TV Comic, TV Century 21 and Doctor Who Magazine. Comic-strips were famously one of the mediums that kept the Doctor alive for the fans when the TV show was off the air for 16 years — yes, excepting Paul McGann’s one-off TV film, don’t write in! — between 1989 and 2005.

The show, which materialises at the Cartoon Museum in London on Wednesday, features work by many writers and artists including Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Dicky Howett, Roger Langridge, David Lloyd, Pat Mills, Alan Moore and John Wagner. It looks set to be a family hit for all generations over the summer. Catch it before it dematerialises on October 30.

Artwork above by Paul Grist and James Offredi

An exhibition of seaside postcards that were banned by local councils in the 1950s opens in Margate this week.

I Wish I Could See My Little Willy named after a postcard by Bob Wilkin, above, enraged the authorities in the prudish post war years. The show is being held at the Pie Factory gallery, opposite Margate’s old magistrate’s court where the publishers of the day would have been prosecuted.

Across the country the authorities confiscated and destroyed thousands of ‘‘saucy’’ postcards as they feared that that the nation’s morals were in decline after the Second World War.

The free exhibition, which opens on July 23 and runs until August 2, is held in conjunction with the British Cartoon Archive, which has been digitising the postcards and putting them online, along with their associated obscene publications index cards, as seen above.

Nick Hiley of the British Cartoon Archive, which is based at the University of Kent in nearby Canterbury, told Bloghorn:

‘‘We are organising the exhibition with the Dreamland Trust in Margate. I will be giving a talk in the magistrates’ court where the cards were condemned — they have a wonderful witness box on casters that I hope to lecture from.’’

The old court is now the Margate Musuem. The talk is at 2pm on July 30. The organisers are hoping to follow it with an airing of the Radio 4 play Getting The Joke by Neil Brand (BBC permission pending). It tells the story of the trial of Donald McGill, acknowledged master of the saucy postcard, in 1953.

We can report that the cartoon exhibition organised by the PCO for this year’s Henley Royal Regatta was a big success.

Many revellers mentioned how much they enjoyed the themed cartoons, which where shown alongside a more traditional display of rowing paintings and prints. Around a third of the cartoons on show were sold.

Clive Goddard, who was instrumental in organising the event, tells us that he hopes the PCO will be able to do the same thing at Henley next year.

The organisation is also hoping to bring themed exhibitions to other key events in next year’s social calendar: perhaps tennis cartoons for Wimbledon, floral cartoons for the Chelsea Flower Show, or music cartoons for the Proms.

If you are involved with an event and think a themed cartoon exhibition would be a great addition, get in touch with the PCO here

Sometimes a cartoonist becomes inextricably likned with a particular topic and for Gerard Hoffnung it was music.

A tuba player himself, Hoffnung (1925-1959) made music the central subject of his work. He was born in Berlin, but Hoffnung’s family moved to London to escape the Nazis in 1939. Though he died only 20 years later, aged 34, he managed to establish himself as a cartoonist with a very English sense of humour.

That humour can be seen in touring exhibition of his work, drawn from the Hoffnung family’s own collection, which is coming to the Chris Beetles Gallery in London. It features many of his best-known musical cartoons.

The gallery will be displaying it alongside the work of William Heath Robinson, in an exhibition called Instruments and Inventions. The exhibition opens on May 25 and runs until June 22. For more details, visit the Chris Beetles Gallery website.