In my last progress report, work was just finishing up for the upcoming permanent exhibit. Christmas break, another lockdown, and a new semester later, and the exhibit is all finished up and Alyssia and I are on to our next project!
While I oh-so patiently waited to find out if I could return to my internship in person, I was able to work on object research remotely. Casa Loma has changed ownership quite a few times, and as a result the origin of some of the objects in the museum is dubious at best. While some objects have meticulous auction records, others seem to have appeared out of thin air. Conducting this object research helped me to gain a fuller understanding of the lifecycle of objects: when/where they were made, their original use, previous owners, and when they came to the museum. While I thoroughly enjoyed looking up old auction records in my pajamas, I left object research in the dust as soon as I was cleared to go back to Casa Loma in person.
Now that the exhibit is installed, Alyssia’s next project is to catalogue and clean Casa Loma’s book collection. This is no small feat. The library which holds the collection features seventeen or so bookcases, which extend nearly to the ceiling. I have yet to measure their exact height, but we had to recruit the help of a terrifying tall ladder to reach the top shelves. (No health and safety hazards here, we had the help of the castle’s maintenance crew). Alyssia estimates that there are a couple thousand books in the collection. The fun part: maybe ¼ of them have been catalogued. That’s an optimistic guess. The rest of them magically made their way into the museum’s collection. All of them needed to be catalogued, cleaned, photographed, and returned to their shelves.
As someone with a book studies minor, this is maybe one of the most exciting tasks I’ve been part of. To be honest, I am quite bad at it. The task requires me to write down the title of each book, along with year the book was published, the author, and the condition it is in. The issue is that instead of doing just this, I get completely sidetracked by the books. Beautiful covers, weird author names, heartfelt inscriptions, and old advertisements hold my attention. My supervisor is no help as she seems to love books to the same degree as me, and never discourages my slow pace. Alyssia and I sit the required six-feet apart at our work stations and shout out the interesting inscriptions we find, or show off a rare copy of the Jungle Book hidden beside a 2006 copy of the Queen’s authorized biography. Though I am not quick at this job, I am certainly learning from it. The most interesting aspect is the inscriptions found in the books, as they hint at the lives these objects had before they came to live in the museum’s collections. One reads “Merry Christmas Love Mum 1910”. Another has “Allison Hale, Victoria College 4T4” written in it. It is eye opening to think of these objects in their past lives: as Christmas presents, as a required text in 1944 for an English major at U of T, as something passed down from a parent to a child. They have entered a new stage in their life, changing from everyday possession to an artifact that requires documentation and care.
The care aspect of this project is removing layers of dust that have settled on the books with a paintbrush. There is no dedicated conservation team at the museum, so the protocol is to limit further deterioration and get rid of surface-level dirt. Cracked spines, loose pages, and peeling covers are noted in the condition report. After that, the books are whisked off to their glamorous photoshoot. They are not being digitized yet. These photos will serve as identifiers when it’s time to assign them accession numbers and organize them. Then, they are returned to their freshly dusted shelves in the order they came down.
The book cataloguing project has been an excellent experience so far. With the new semester, my internship has been moved to Mondays when the museum is closed to the public which allows us to work in the library without being in the way of any visitors. It has been a wonderful opportunity to see the behind-the-scenes work that occurs in a museum even when it appears closed. I have been able to meet many more employees at the museum undertaking all sorts of tasks that can’t be completed when the castle is open. I’ve gotten to see the floors being restained, and light bulbs replaced. Though this sounds sort of routine, I find these aspects of maintenance and care of the museum itself very fascinating. I have learned a lot about object care, so it is an interesting parallel to see the museum being cleaned and restored right alongside its objects.
As a graduate of this internship herself, my supervisor Alyssia has been sharing her own thoughts about the role material culture plays in the castle. It is from her that I learned about the life cycle of objects, which was the topic of her paper for her internship. I am learning not only how to properly handle these books, clean them, and photograph them, but also how they came to be in the museum and why it is important to consider what is part of a collection and why.
There are still many more shelves to catalog, and I am looking forward to all the books I have yet to meet! This experience has me considering writing my final paper about books in some form, so I am excited to see what other literary mysteries we may stumble upon that may inspire my final paper and hopefully inspire a great final grade.
Internship Breakdown:
Total hours worked to date: 93
Hours breakdown:
January 10th -24th- remote object research (20 hours)
January 19th and 24th- Zoom with Alyssia to discuss research (1 hour)
January 31st- cleaning, cataloguing, and photographing books (4 hours)
Week of January 31st- remote research into books in collection (5 hours)
February 7th- cleaning, cataloguing, and photographing books (4 hours)
Week of February 7th- remote research into books in collection, namely Allison Hale (5 hours)
February 14th- cleaning, cataloguing, and photographing books (4 hours)
Readings:
*note: not all of these sources are read in their entirety, mostly perused for pertinent content/topics
Bilski, Emily D. 2021. “The Lives of Objects Beyond Ownership: The Meaning of Provenance.” Internationales Archiv Für Sozialgeschichte Der Deutschen Literatur 46 (1): 300–322. https://doi.org/10.1515/iasl-2021-0018.
Jenkins, Rebecca, Mike Molesworth, and Richard Scullion. 2014. “The Messy Social Lives of Objects: Inter-Personal Borrowing and the Ambiguity of Possession and Ownership.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 13 (2): 131–39. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.1469.
Moran, Anna. 2014. Love Objects : Emotion, Design, and Material Culture. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
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