What is the Broons and Oor Wullie anniversary event
The Broons and Oor Wullie Turn 90, and the Archives Are Coming Out
There are more serious things in the National Library of Scotland’s collections than a boy with a spiky haircut and a suspiciously large vocabulary of complaints. There are also fewer things that have been read across generations, passed between siblings, carried on trains, and left with the corners of annuals quietly collapsing.
Popular Culture Is Still Part of the Record The Library and DC Thomson are marking 90 years of The Broons and Oor Wullie with a weekend of displays and family events from 24 to 26 July 2026. Edinburgh comes first on 24 July, followed by Glasgow and Dundee. The programme will include rare collection items, early appearances, annuals, and material from the DC Thomson archive.
The Annuals Tell Their Own Story I am especially interested in the annuals. Not because every page has aged perfectly. Some jokes now require the gentle handling usually reserved for brittle pamphlets. But annuals show how reading actually happened: shared, seasonal, domestic, and repeatedly revisited. They were not always treated as important objects, which is precisely why libraries and archives matter. Someone has to keep the things people loved before anyone thought to call them cultural history.
It is also a useful reminder that popular reading does not need to pass an entrance examination before it belongs in a national collection. Comics, newspapers, annuals, and children’s books record accents, fashions, anxieties, family habits, and the changing shape of Scotland. They tell us what people looked at while waiting for Christmas dinner, or what survived after the wrapper and the bookmark disappeared.
The National Library’s announcement is worth a look if you are fond of Scottish comics, archive material, or the less glamorous evidence of how people read. I will be quietly hoping for a display case containing at least one magnificently battered annual. Preferably with its owner’s name written inside, because readers have always been very good at leaving evidence behind.