Elin Gregory

I’ve been trying to thin out some of our stuff mountains at work. See the photo to our left – that’s well ordered museum storage. Some of our museum is very like that with dexion shelves stacked with neatly labelled boxes. But there are other parts where we have boxes, bags, envelopes, and brown paper packages tied up in string of donated items that we are processing and finding safe homes for. Since we went over to lone working, had our hours cut and our volunteers only come in one morning a week, we have a bit of a backlog. Add to that the normal detritus you get with a business where we are ordered to keep all correspondence for 2 years and everything financial for seven years AND the museum mindset that says “OMG you can’t throw that away, it might be important” and we look a bit more like hoarders than collectors.
So I’m chucking out masses of bits of paper, snipping relevant articles out of newspapers – all the usual – and sometimes come across things that are baffling. For instance, a scrap of paper with a transcription of what appears to be part of a probate inventory:

Bookes
Imprimis bookes in folio about fower scores
Item of semi-folio about seven and twenty
Item of Quarto large and small about one hundred and [hole in page]
Item of sixto and octavo large and small and severalle others of duodecimo about three hundreds and sixtie
Appriased at thirtie eight poundes and fifteen shillinges

And there’s a squiggle that I think might be 1748. A pretty good library for the time, I think. And now I have recorded it here I can throw the bit of paper away.