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.