While rearranging my desk the other day, I came across two inventories for the house dating from the 1950’s and the 1960’s.  Neither are especially complete nor are they especially trustworthy, with several egregious errors on the first page alone of the professionally (?) done one from the 1960’s.  Deciphering them is made more difficult by the slow movement of objects so that none of the rooms match the descriptions of the inventories.

Inventories tend to go almost immediately out of date if they are organized by the object’s location, unless it is a static house museum.  But even there, every object has been given its own tracking number if the museum is serious about its work.  Ideally, every object gets its own card with a description and picture.  Every object.  Not sets.  This used to be a formidably expensive undertaking in paper and ink; the digital age has helped with that, though arguably it has meant an over-abundance of information without selection.

Still, both are very useful.  Most useful is the personal one compiled by Lucy Creevey in the 1950’s.  Uninterested in price, her inventory frequently gives the history of the object.  Unfortunately, figuring out which object she was discussing can be difficult.  The other one is mostly concerned about the price of the object and has those aforementioned errors; but still is interesting.

I suppose after 50 years…what an appallingly large project.*

*yes I know, First get the book/art one finished and off the non-working computer.  Pitfalls of digitized information….I can read the 1954 inventory, I can’t read the 2010 one because of the computer it is on…and yes I should have backed it up.