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...