Mine's Bigger Than Yours

Archive reading rooms are, for the most part, sober and quiet places.  They really aren't collaborative spaces...or social spaces.  I can probably count on my hands how many times I've had an interaction with a fellow reader that went beyond a nod or some simple service.  People keep themselves to themselves.  But there is amongst historical researchers a pathological nosiness about whatever it is you are looking at.  So while no one may ever ask you what you are working on, they will surreptitiously inspect your materials from afar.

We might think that we are above such things, but there's a kind of hierarchy of coolness.

For example...

Old trumps young.  Dirty trumps clean.  Handwriting trumps print (with some exceptions for really old, embossed, or frilly typescript).  Unbound trumps bound.  A Top Secret stamp trumps a Private stamp.  Bigger is better.  3D trumps all else.

Mostly we seem to deal in bound manuscripts: letters and papers that have been treated, sometimes grafted on to new paper, and put into these massive volumes. Can be typed or handwritten or both.

  This is a bound book of letters of applications to the Secretary of War and the Colonies (Lord Bathurst) for permission to emigrate and requests for land grants in New South Wales.  Cool rating: 5.5 due to age, state of spine and largeness (about 8 inches thick).

Sometimes we deal with loose manuscripts or letters:

This is a bankruptcy avidavit from 1745.  Cool rating: 4.8 due to age, being unbound, and fairly moldering.

 Or scrolls!:

This is a series of petitions fro the 1810s on agricultural distress in Upper Canada. Cool rating; 7.4 due to largeness and scrolliness.

Or, big slabs of mold-encrusted, perfectly indecipherable and useless, but seriously cool. What's even cooler is to sit there and pretend that you are some kind archival genius and pretend that you are able to garner something of great importance from this disintegrating blackness.

Supposedly this is a land tithe record.  Sure.  Whatever.  Cool Rating: 9.5

Bonus points awarded if your hands are filthy after touching these pieces:

                         

And occasionally, I hit the jackpot by find lots of great 3D stuff:

Like someone's wallet. Cool Rating 9.7 

Or some fuzzy stuff (flax I think?) I also came across some real greasy wool from 1786, but it was in the British Library were I daren't take a photo.   Cool Rating 9.2

And then we have the Bigger is Better category.  The winner here is somewhat predictable: a map.  But seeing as how I don't normally deal in maps, it felt pretty cool.  Cool rating: 8.6

But sometimes bigger isn't better, especially when there is some economizing of paper going on: 

A personal favorite archival find of mine is doodles and drawings.

Here's a sedate drawing of some tufts of grass (appropriate to my project).  This is also a good example of why taking photographs off microfilm projections sucks.

Arthur Young (one of my main guys) was quite the artist.  He would include pretty little drawings and diagrams in his letters.  This is from a letter to Jeremy Bentham (mastermind of the panopticon), illustrating the panopticonic farmyard. 

Arthur Young also had one of the more tedious jobs that has ever been...keeping the minutes for the Board of Agriculture.  Occasionally, he doodled.  Funny how some things just transcend time and space. 

This is from Young's friend,  Rev. John Symonds, a very somber-looking professor of Modern History at Cambridge.  This is one of many self-portraits he sent Young in the 1780s and 90s.  

Sir Joseph Banks seemed to collect a lot of interesting little sketches from his foreign correspondents as well.

 

Lumbar Support in the Archive Repositories of London

Here is my illustrated version of the lack of lumbar support in the chairs provided in the reading rooms of the main archives that I have visited.

For anyone who works at a desk all day, you know that your chair is important.  Basically, sitting in a chair all day is about the worst thing you can do for your back.  My back is really bad to begin with (insert long saga of debilitating back ailments) so I'm very aware of chair quality.  I don't even have a chair at my place.  I sit on a giant Swiss ball that I packed (deflated) from home.  In my old apartment in Chicago, I bought a decent office chair with some lumbar support, but more importantly, used a really tall utility table with my computer screen on a stand so that I never have to lean over while I'm working.

But when you don't have an office or regular workspace, you are just at the mercy of whatever chair it is that Fill-in-the-Blank institution bought in bulk.  And you can't exactly file a worker's comp claim with The British Library when you go cripple from bad seating.

THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Despite its modern architecture, the BL has opted for vintage charm in the seating department.
It's low, straight-backed wooden chairs are garnished with a largely decorative leather pad on the back
and seat areas....nothing so common as arms.  The main problem, though, is that the desks are too low for the chair.
If you want to actually be able to read the tiny scrawl of whatever it is you are looking at (helped along by very poor lighting), you must bend at the waist to get your face closer to the material.  This causes sacroiliac joint pain, butt numbness, and cervical spasms (of the neck, not the cervix).   

THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

At least the Natural History Museum, built in the mid-19th century has a valid excuse to be terrible.  Basically the NHM chairs are the same as the BL chairs, except more austere and more...broken.  Both table and chair (both built probably pre-1870) are decidedly wobbly and make very loud noises that reverberate through the high vaulted ceilings whenever you deign to move.  Usually there is only one position that brings stability, and it is the one pictured above.  This causes spine misalignment, coccyx pain, and hip dysplasia.

 THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS AT KEW

Kew Gardens has these funky, post-modern, late-1970s colored chairs (orange, green, and burnt sienna) that feel like swiveling movie director's chairs.  There's no real support to them, it's basically like a butt-hammock on a thin metal frame.  The swiveling feature prevents muscular atrophy, but every time you get up to get another document, it's like getting up off a beach chair, forcing all your bulging spinal discs to shift position.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES AT KEW

After all these terrible chair experiences, I arrive at The National Archives in Kew, where I see these beautiful chairs that look like they are just made to support the lower back.  The chair back even looks like a model spine.  They have arms.  They are height adjustable.  They look terribly expensive.  Sit in them for 8 hours, though, and they are only marginally better than the preceding chairs.  Discernibly better, I'd say, but not the miracle that their sleek design seemed to promise.  No specific medical threats involved...just general malaise.