Month 5 (November 2011)
This month I have been mostly... Discovering how much I've learnt.
My first month of solid cataloguing is complete! Favourite items I’ve discovered in the collection this month:
- Butler's annotated copies of Handel’s piano music, from which he practised
- A semi-completed ‘Samuel Butler crossword puzzle’, extracted from a newspaper (I don’t blame whoever gave up on it – it’s really difficult!)
Annotated Handel score, from Samuel Butler's collection
I’ve now created records for every box and folder in the ‘Miscellaneous papers’ section, a task I began in August. Each of the 41 boxes contains anything from two to twelve folders, and many of these folders are crammed with papers and correspondence that are potentially significant not only in the context of Samuel Butler but in their own right. In these cases I’ve catalogued to the level of the individual item – for example, a letter, photograph or newspaper cutting. You have to get into the mindset of a researcher to be able to decide which items merit this level of attention, and how you can most usefully and accurately describe something to aid someone who’d want to find it but doesn’t yet know it exists! I try to imagine the key names, words and terms someone might use in a search, and then incorporate these into the records. This becomes easier the more time you spend with a collection, as you start to recognise the names of significant people mentioned in letters, or to understand how an untitled manuscript relates to a work published later.
A Samuel Butler crossword puzzle
Checking my own catalogue records has also formed a big part of my work. We’re aiming to upload the first part of the new catalogue onto Janus before Christmas, so I’m going through all my early records, adding in details I missed the first time round and tidying up my descriptions to make sure the style is consistent across the catalogue. I’ve been amazed, and encouraged, by how much I’ve learnt just from shuffling various papers around!
The Samuel Butler Collection on the Janus catalogue
As a bonus diversion I also spent a few days looking at the printed music in the collection. I knew from reading biographies (and the Notebooks) that Butler was obsessed with the music of Handel, and this really comes across in looking at his personal music collection. I was spurred on to do this by the invitation to write a short article for MusiCB3, a blog about music collections in Cambridge. You can now read the article here.
Samuel Butler at his piano