Library People

Happy Easter everyone! Finally, a slightly easier one than the past few!

So on the face of it, it's just me and Barbara B - I'm full time in the library, and she puts in 12 hours a week on the dealers' catalogues.

But the museum actually has effectively three libraries: the Reference Library, the Coins & Medals Library (which is technically part of the Reference Library but works largely autonomously), and the Founders' Library, which started as the collection given by the original founder and which has grown from there. So that means we need to include Nicholas and Tanya in the head count. Then there's the library at the Hamilton Kerr Institute - ably run by Sarah.

Aaaaand then we have all the volunteers who come and work in the Reference Library each week - that's Lally and Paul, our volunteers, and then the MSSPB volunteers work in the library too, so that's Barbara, Jean, Trudy and Erika. Lots of library people! So I did a picture:

Object

This one's tough - in my WFH library I have literally zero objects which aren't books/catalogues, and I can't think of anything right now in the rest of the rest of the collection either. Objects usually go to other departments, which makes sense!

One thing I'm missing a bit are my IKEA Fejka plants. I'm no gardener, and real plants are too much of a risk to have near museum objects, because they can encourage pests, so fake ones rule the roost at the library. About £20 saw three mini succulents, a trailing plant and a small shrub which all sit on the library windowsills.

Why bother with them at all? Because real plants have a very positive effect on library spaces, as shown in a number of studies (see this news post from the Moore Library for some links). And okay, I can't clean the air or reduce the effects of Sick Building Syndrome with these plastic beauties. But they add a splash of colour into a very white room otherwise, and who knows? Maybe the clearer thinking, positive feeling and idea-generation effects of real plants aren't just because of the greater oxygen and cleaner air but also because plants cheer people up? That's certainly been the evidence of activity during lockdown - everyone's been busy in their gardens (if they have one)! Even I've planted lavender, tomatoes and sunflowers, and I'm more finger of death than green-fingered!

Food & Drink

Apart from the parties (see Library Celebrations from two days ago) there's not really much food and drink in the library, apart from the endless amounts of coffee that I drink solely to survive.

But as you might be aware, there is currently a glorious giant pineapple outside our museum.

This is the key emblem of our fantastic exhibition "Feast & Fast", which is about food, material culture and the art of food 1500-1800. Sadly, it's going to have ended before the museum can reopen, so if you didn't get to go then your best bet is buying the sumptuous catalogue that accompanied it (I'll put a link here if anyone's interested once the museum's online shop is up and running again) - obviously there's a copy for perusal in the library too, once we're back!

One thing people might not know is just how far in advance some of the work is done for these exhibitions. Here is a tweet I wrote nearly 3 years before the exhibition opened, about some of the sources we used for research!

Someone please tell me how you are supposed to catalogue books about food without getting hungry? #EatExhibition @FitzMuseum_UK pic.twitter.com/B0YkVe1RSb

— Diana Caulfield (@dsw26) August 24, 2017

Library Secrets

What a silly title, right? If I told you all my library secrets they wouldn't be secret anymore!

Once again I'm racking my brains for something I can say - and this time it's got to be something I can say without giving away too many state secrets. So...hmm. Let's go behind the scenes a bit and talk about the side of the library that most people never see - the really grotty, dank and shadowy side that even I try not to think about too hard most of the time..

Secret The First: We actually have a lot more books than you might think.

Although I've actually got no idea of the exact figure, I'm fairly confident that we have over 350,000 books and catalogues. And the reason why I have no idea of the exact figure is

Secret The Second: We have never done a stocktake.

For many logistical reasons, including multiple catalogues (including two card catalogues!), too many books, too many locations and not enough staff. One other of those logistical reasons is

Secret The Third: Most of our books are NOT in classmark order.

A good majority of the books are held in departments across the museum. They're roughly organised by subject where there's been space to do so, but librarians past (curse you guys!) used some very rough classifications at times, not being consistent at all (we have at last count 5 separate classification systems for all our books, catalogues and periodicals), and where they've been consistent has actually been a bane too - for example we have around 300 books on maiolica all with an identical classmark (42 NK4315). So when I'm fetching a book, I'm drawing on a lot of skills to locate it!

There - three secrets. And now I've said too much!

Shhh...

Library Celebrations

Taking this one a bit literally, we used to have Christmas parties in the library for all staff at the museum, which was always good fun. Sadly there's no longer the space (the above picture is pre-removal of open shelves), and there are plenty of other museum festive celebrations - and other celebrations too, like when we've worked really hard on an exhibition, or a refurbishment of a gallery.

Of course, at the moment ain't no celebrations at all. I can think of two recently which had to be postponed (let's not say cancelled just yet) - the building of a lab which meant the library got its office back (can you tell what I was most looking forward to celebrating? ;) ) and the refurbishment of a gallery which has just recently reopened to the public to glorious fanfare.

It's times like this you think you're never going to take those moments for granted anymore.

Famous Archives

I have to say, this one has stumped me a bit. But it's Day 7 and I'm going to have to come up with something, so maybe I'll talk a little bit about some of the donors of collections that have come to the library, because some of them are pretty well-known.

Richard, Viscount Fitzwilliam

Obviously there was the original donor: Richard, VII Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion, whose donation set up the museum in the first place, but I'm fairly sure the reference library has nothing of his in its collection. The "library" that was received in his bequest is kept in the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books, and includes the famed Fitzwilliam Virginal book.

Work by Degas

One that seems to have been incredibly generous was the classicist A.S.F. Gow, who spent much of his life at Trinity College, and served on the museum board. When he died, he left the museum his collection of works by Degas, which is reasonably well-known. However, he also left hundreds - perhaps thousands? (I don't know, I've never counted) of books - his Loeb Classical Library collection, his texts on the Italian Renaissance, I think we even received his complete Dictionary of National Biography (vastly superceded nowadays, but a really useful resource at the time)!

Godfrey Gompertz

It seems a trend for collectors to not only donate their art objects but also their enormous libraries of books on their favourite subjects. One, Godfrey Gompertz donated one of the finest collections of Choson and Koryo ceramics outside Korea, in the spirit of improving Western understanding about this remote country. But also we have his many books on "Corea", as it was referred to in the 1930s! Another ceramics collector more recently, John Shakeshaft, has considerably added to our Applied Arts material with 26 boxes of books and hundreds of pottery items, particularly studio pottery.

Sir Sydney Cockerell

There are a few directors of the museum who perhaps deserve a special shout out: Sir Sydney Cockerell is one, who had a bit of a reputation for cajoling people to gift their artworks to the museum in their wills. We have a couple of his books which were actually gifts to him from Queen Mary of Teck (the irony, of course, being that Mary was herself quite acquisitive!). Louis Clarke was another whose name crops up in reference library books time and again, but unsurprisingly I think we've had gifts from most of the directors through the years.

Winifred Lamb

Finally, just because this is a rather male list, a few of the women who have also contributed through the years: A woman called Helen Forester (who I know nothing else about!) had a keen interest in art history, and her books can be found in the reference library and in the Hamilton Kerr Institute library. Winifred Lamb, a former Keeper of Antiquities, left many books to the collection, complete with annotations about our own collections of antiquities. Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books until very recently, has donated a huge number of books on manuscripts and incunabula, while Julia Poole, a former Keeper of Applied Arts, frequently gives the library her personal copies of books on maiolica. Without these contributions, the holdings of the reference library wouldn't be nearly as rich and wonderful!

Something New

Here's my something new - bit of a cheat because it's not particularly new, having been published a couple of years ago, but it's new to the library: The Anatomy of Riches : Sir Robert Paston's Treasure by Spike Bucklow.

Spike is one of the staff at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, the part of the museum which deals with easel painting conservation. Recently he put together a rather wonderful exhibition called Sharpening Perceptions : How to copy a masterpiece, which takes works which had been conserved at the HKI and puts them alongside the copies that the first year students did of them as they cleaned and restored them. One of the paintings included is Spike's copy of Flowers and Fruit by Jan Van Os which he himself did as a student at HKI many years ago!

The Paston Treasure is a painting that Spike conserved, of the treasured possessions of Sir Robert Paston. Included are some exquisite works of art, nautilus cups, jewellery, vases and so on. It was the subject of a big exhibition too, for which we have the catalogue (classmark: New Haven.2018).

I've picked it because it has a little more meaning for me at the moment, as I'm part of the conference working party of ARLIS's Cambridge 2020 conference - which has been postponed to 2021 now, but so much of the planning had been done already. Spike was going to talk about this for us (and will hopefully do so next year when the conference finally happens) from his conservation perspective.

However, it's also a very uncomfortable painting. We don't actually know much about the people in it - it's thought that the girl might be Paston's granddaughter, and in place of the clock there was for a while a silver platter, and before that a mystery woman, but never mind how lavishly the boy is dressed, in his brocade and gold chains, it's very likely that he was a slave.

I think it's curious though that we don't have a name for the artist either. So much discussion goes on about the artist's gaze and looking at the models (there's an interesting exhibition which looks at the relationship between Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent at the moment at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), that it's really interesting that we lack both sides of this communication, not just one.