Another day's cataloguing

 Glorious blue sky but absolutely freezing this morning up at the Athenaeum with ice in the outside toilet washbasin until noon.

However, this time I had the sense to wear a pair of wool socks, coupled with a merino t-shirt under my jumper, so I stayed warm, even if I perhaps looked a bit like the Michelin man.

As an experiment we've replaced the classic cardboard tent moth traps with dome traps, with the idea that the contents will be less likely to leak and damage the books or artefacts if they get forgotten about or if the liquid starts to flow more than expected over a run of hot summer days

Cataloguing itself was fairly straightforward with the usual mix of late nineteenth century sensation novels that have been long forgotten such as this 1874 potboiler, still with Mudie's labels on the cover

and the usual mix of cirme and mystery novels from the 1930s and 40s. It's noticable how poor the quality of the paper is in the nineteen thirties, and especially the nineteen forties novels, compared with that of sensation novels from the 1870s and 1880s.

I'm ascribing this to printers still using either rag paper or paper made from mixture of rag and woodchip pulp in the nineteenth century, but by the 1930s they were using woodchip almost exclusively.

The nineteen forties books are particularly bad - something that I put down to war time economy measures and a mix of recycled paper and virgin pulp, producing paper that after eighty years is distinctly yellow and brittle, and will almost certainly be a conservation challenge down the track...

Juvenal or Juvenile

 The last week or so, my bedtime reading has been Lindsey Davis's 'Murder in Purple and Gold' which takes place against the background of the Roman Floralia festival.

I must confess to a weakness for Lindsey Davis's Roman mysteries, and despite being complete fantasy, they are impeccably researched and the background is accurate.

Now, despite my deep fascination with Roman history, I didn't know much about Floralia. 

This isn't unusual, there's not that much known other than the festival is said to have been implemented around 238BCE during the early, not quite mythical, period of the republic and was in response to a series of very wet cold springs.

In an agrarian society, dependent on what they could grow locally, which was the case in the early republic, a series of wet cold springs when the crops didn't start to grow properly meant hunger, and possibly starvation. It's possible that this was due to volcanic activity, but no one really knows.

Anyway Floralia started as a festival of fertility and new growth. What form it took at the beginning  is not known, or even whether there had been some earlier agrarian festivals that were formalised into Floralia.

Fast forward to the end of the first century CE.

Floralia was still going strong. Unlike many Roman religious festivals it was light on austere ceremony and had evolved into a raunchy raucous celebration of life including naked acrobats of both sexes, nude dancing  and naked prostitutes dressed up as gladiators (basically minimal pretend armour and not a lot else) engaging in mock gladiator fights.

Well that's what we think anyway. Actual written sources are fairly sparse. There's a reference to Cato going into a tent where a naked comedy was being performed, and walking out in disgust, some prim later writers expressing po-faced disapproval, and the satirist Juvenal, who provides some fairly ambiguous descriptions of what went on in satire#6.

Basically, it seems to be the case that everyone knew what went on, the Roman fun police disapproved, and not many people wrote about it, or if they did, what they wrote didn't survive.

And this is my cautionary tale.

Being a geek, I thought I'd see what various historians had written about Juvenal's descriptions of Floralia and the associated events by searching for

'juvenal naked dancers floralia'

which while it might not be the sort of thing you would do at work, is eminently justifiable as a search.

Unfortunately Google didn't think so, decided I couldn't spell juvenile, and cautioned me about searching for abusive material.

Perhaps I should have capitalised juvenal, or omitted his name entirely from the search string, but there you go, what's done is done.

Incidentally, this isn't the first time I've had problems with the word juvenile. 

While documenting the contents of Lake View, I came across a number of children's books produced by a company called Juvenile Productions in the 1930s that seems to have little or no trace of itself. Most of the books are reprints of earlier children's stories, and had titles that included words like 'fairy'.

At the time of publication there was probably no hint of nastiness linked to the title, but now, we live in a different world...

Moth traps - a cautionary tale

 Well, we had a near miss up at the Athenaeum today.

Like a lot of similar bodies we use sticky moth traps a bit like the ones below to minimise the risks of insect damage 

all good.

Good practice is that you put the moth traps in the display cabinets, date them, check them in a month or so, and either replace them or remove them as not required.

These traps work by having a layer of glue on the base of the triangle and the idea is that the insect or other nasty gets caught in the glue.

And now for the cautionary part of the story.

I was cataloguing some nineteenth century novels this morning and found a moth trap that had been placed on top of the novels in the display case.

The books had been wrapped in mylar bags (a bit like kitchen ziplocs) as they were in poor condition, with broken spines, insect damage and the like.

The insect traps had been dated to late 2019/early 2020 and had not been removed or replaced, and the glue, which is thixotropic, had flowed off the trap and on to the mylar bags.

Fortunately no damage had been done to the books and it was simply a matter of removing the moth trap and then replacing the sticky bags with new ones.

The dates are significant, just before the pandemic when everything was locked down, and importantly, a lot of voluntary organisations saw a significant turn over, with people simply not coming back after the lockdowns were over, and other people taking their place.

This of course meant that any handover of duties was patchy at best, and some things simply got missed.

The solution is simple, a search and destroy mission for any other outdated moth traps, as well as checking for damage, and putting in place a task calendar to ensure that the traps are checked regularly in the future.

And why am I airing our dirty linen in public like this?

Well, we're not the only volunteer run organisation in the world, and I'm sure other organisations must have had a breakdown in procedure like we did.

And I'd like to emphasise that no one did the wrong thing, it's just that in a period of churn things get lost. In this case we got away with it, another time we might not be so lucky...

it's been a Wilkie Collins sort of a day...

As usual, I had my morning cataloguing up at the Athenaeum, and this morning it was Wilkie Collins, one of my favourite nineteenth century authors.

Strangely, unless it's been misclassified and I'm yet to find it, we don't appear to have a copy of The Woman in White, which is perhaps his best known novel today.

This isn't terribly unusual - the Woman in White was incredibly popular when it first appeared, and it's possible that the book simply wore out and was not replaced. As I've said before the accession registers and other paperwork relating to the early days of the Athenaeum's library have disappeared

The Woman in White made Wilkie Collin's reputation, even inspiring a cartoon by his friend John Leech depicting a housholder, engrossed in his novel being ordered to come to bed by his wife.

What we do have is a second edition of the Moonstone, unfortunately volume three is missing

which was clearly sourced second hand from Mullen's as the books have remnant Mullen's circulating library labels, 

a copy of Poor Miss Finch that dates from 1872 that was probably bought new by the Athenaeum, copies of his early novels Antonina and Basil that have been professionally rebound, suggesting that they were reasonably popular and even a yellowback edition of Miss or Mrs from the end of the nineteenth century suggesting Wilkie Collins remained popular throughout his lifetime and beyond

Other than that, it was the usual mix of late Victorian and Edwardian adventure novels, interwar mysteries and 1950s romance novels...

Bottles documented (and a few books)

 Well after last week's unplanned cancellation, it was back to cataloguing the bottles as promised, as well as a few more books in the historic book collection

the job itself was fairly straightforward, and as I'd carefully packed up a box with my little Linux documentation laptop, some weights to hold the background down, right angled rulers etc it seemed to be really quick - actually it took me about an hour due to being out of practice in assembling a documentation package, but I got there.

I'm happy that the procedure, derived from my work with both Lake View and Dow's is robust. My only real worry is the use of excel format for the spreadsheet - its use is only part of my procedure because originally the National Trust had a workflow where they converted the excel spreadsheets automagically to  csv for ingest to their archive management system.

It could be argued that instead of xlsx I should have used ods, or indeed generated a csv format file to ensure the long term accessibility of the data.

In this case I don't think it matters over much, but just for fun I added an ods and csv subdirectory with the supplementary spreadsheets

and replaced the manifest.txt file with an updated version to reflect this change.

Other than that it was simply a case of yet more documentation of the historic book collection.

No spectacular finds, just mid century romance and mystery novels, which perhaps reflects a post war desire for a touch of colour and escapism, but I did find one book that had previously belonged to a circulating library in Melbourne operated by Myer's ...

Not a lot of progress

 Well, the bottles I planned to document yesterday are still undocumented, and I didn't catalogue any of the historic book collection either. I'd had to cancel my morning working up at the Athenaeum due to unforeseen circumstances.

As I alluded to elsewhere, J was due to have a minor medical procedure as day surgery earlier this week, and it turned into one of these things where the wheels come off - because she ended up having to stay overnight and wasn't discharged when we thought she would be, our whole carefully planned schedule fell apart.

We were late home, missed picking the cat up from the cat motel, etc, etc etc...

Well, these things happen, and when they do you just have to roll with it, and sometimes things have to cancelled or reorganised, and one of these things was my morning at the Athenaeum.

However I did do a fair part of the preparation before hand, checking camera batteries were charged, firing up the documentation computer to do any necessary updates, and making up a base recording spreadsheet.

It's a fairly specific job, so I don't need all of my documentation kit, just a couple of scales, a micrometer and a set of glass weights to hold the backdrop down, which will all fit in a simple plastic carry box, and of course my trusty digital SLR to take high resolution images, and certainly easier than taking the whole documentation kit which fills a couple plastic boxes these days.

Once the bottles are documented, I'll make up a little documentation package, one copy of which I'll save to OneDrive and the other I'll write to a USB stick to be squirreled away and archived ...

Bottles (again)

 Up at the Athenaeum, one of my colleagues brought in three glass bottles found while digging in her garden and asked me to take a look at them.

The bottles all look to be from the first half of the twentieth century, and are fairly generic examples of medicine bottles.

This first one is a fairly generic clear glass bottle of the sort used to package aspirin and similar over the counter medicines.

The second one is a little more interesting. Made from brown glass, which has become slightly crazed over the years, it has Faulding embossed on one of the narrower faces of the bottle. Faulding is a long established Australian manufacturer of over the counter remedies.

The bottle is not ribbed or dimpled suggesting it orginally contained a non prescription medicine.

The final bottle is potentially more interesting, consisting of a narrow clear glass cylinder. Close examination showed that it still had a label in white paint on the bottle, albeit faded and worn.

Playing about with the image using Microsoft photo editor brought up the words 'Nyal Cold Sore'.

Like Faulding, Nyal is a long established Australian brand of off the shelf pharmaceutical products. Experience documenting Nyal products at Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern suggests that the form of the logo used - with its distinctive lower case 'y' - means that the bottle dates to the late 1950s or early 1960s

The plan is to document them fully next week, using the folksonomy I developed for the Dow's documentation project. The items are fairly generic and we are not a collecting institution, so once documented we will offer them to a local museum - unlike many bottles, these ones most definitely have a provenance...