The collection was established in 1970. It was acquired from Desmond Seaton Reid. The collection is a large collection of engraved and lithographed sheets depicting actors and scenes from a variety of British and European plays. Texts for many of the plays accompany the sheets.
Individual sheets show actors in the costumes and poses they used in actual productions.
Stage sets were also reproduced. The earliest sheets were designed as souvenir portraits for adult theatre-goers and showed individual actors in favourite roles. Later sheets showed all the characters and settings from an actual production and often included a play book with the entire text. These were directed toward a juvenile audience who would cut out and mount the characters and sets and produce the play in the nursery, using a small-scale replica of an actual theatre. The plays cover the range from Shakespeare and Scott to fairy tales, pantomines, and melodramas.