juni

When I was in library school ten years ago, 2016, the Boston Public Library had recently gone through a scandal, as stated in the tags, where it was believed a couple of prints by the artist Albrecht Dürer, German artist from the late 1400s and early 1500s, was stolen. This was a BIG DEAL because like, who steals from a library, but also HOW, and of course the prints were VERY VALUABLE. Also, this is also the city where 30 years ago a couple guys walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and just. Took paintings off the wall. And left. So that was still in the public memory.

After further investigation, the prints were discovered! Yay! Where were they?

In the same room they were supposed to be in.

Three shelves away.

The box they were stored in was put on a different shelf from where they were supposed to go, and when someone went to look for the box, it wasn't where it was supposed to be, and they couldn't find it, so. OBviously it was stolen.

Anyway. This whole incident revealed just how poorly the Prints & Photographs collection at the BPL was organized.

Which is to say: it wasn't.

The last person in charge of the collection was extremely interested in acquisition, but not so much in the organization and storage of said acquisitions. Which is. You know. The whole point of a library. It wasn't just him, though. There was virtually no cataloging of the collection. For decades, the prints and photographs were just kind of... put in the collection room. A very safe climate controlled room, to be sure, and (mostly) in archival folders and boxes, but apart from a few labels on shelves, and a single old card catalog that was extremely vague and out of date, the entirety of the collection's organization method was essentially "well I always put this box on this shelf here, so that's where it goes." And new things? Just went wherever there was space.

The whole "oh no the Dürers were stolen oh wait no they weren't" thing was an extremely public revelation of the horrifying state of the collection. So the BPL decided to start from the ground up and fully inventory, catalog, and appropriately organize the collection. One of my professors in the Simmons LIS program was hired to run the inventory efforts, and she hired her grad students to do it, and I was one of those grad students.

So for six ish months, I had a part time job going into a secret locked room in the depths of the BPL, picking boxes off a shelf, recording where I got the box from, what was in the box, what state those things were in, and then putting it back on the shelf.

There weren't just shelves though. A previous head of the collection was... very into circus stuff? Like... I don't know. But some of the prints were old circus advertisements and there were cardboard boxes of... idk. Circus toys and stuff. And we had to go through them, because they were part of the collection. WHY were they part of the collection? No idea. That wasn't our job. Just go through the clowns, guys. Gotta put it in the Excel spreadsheet, and then it's the cataloger's problem.

There were way more just. Random cardboard boxes. I don't really remember how many, but enough that you're like "jeez guys, this is your JOB. what the fuck are you doing." But we had to go through them, because that WAS our job.

One of these cardboard boxes had a false bottom.

Now, wait. I need to clarify. This isn't an archival box. This is a plain Jane corrugated cardboard box.

With a false. Bottom.

Why?

It was hiding letters.

Love letters.

Written to the previous head of the collection.

From woman who was not his wife.

At the time, they were both still alive, and they were both still married.

And these letters were... well. Purple prose and flowery romance and we DID do dramatic readings of a couple but not all of them. There were definitely Harlequin Romance level descriptions of intimate moments. Our supervisor very wisely made us all go back to our work and took care of the letters herself.

Did they get inventoried?

Maybe.

I honestly don't know.

But also WHAT THE HECK.

I hope BPL learned their lesson and has gotten more serious about inventorying and cataloging their stuff as a result of all of these shenanigans.