November 2008

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Archive

Other catalogues long in gestation and awaiting publication include Valentin Kockel’s catalogue of the cork models, and Martin Henig and Gertrud Seidmann’s catalogue of Soane’s collection of antique and modern gems. Cornelius Vermeule’s 1950 catalogue of Soane’s Graeco-Roman marbles has been revised and added to, although it too has remained unpublished. In 2006, Stephen Massil completed a three- year fixed-term contract to catalogue the books in Soane’s ‘General Library’ – work on the ‘Architectural Library’ having been largely completed – but more work remains to be done editing all these entries for the online library catalogue.

Despite all this activity, it is true to say that the museum’s progress in cataloguing its collections has been frustratingly slow and expensive. Nor have our catalogues, produced with so much care and expense, been as widely accessible as they should and could be. Over the past three years, the museum has been trying to find a way to streamline the production and publication of catalogues of its collections, without compromising on scholarship and quality. Some progress has been made.

The challenge is crystallised by the 9,000 drawings from the Adam office acquired by Soane in 1833 that are one of the museum’s great treasures (Fig. 2). The original specification for the Adam catalogue was modelled on that developed for other catalogues of the museum’s drawings collection – impressive, scholarly volumes in hardback, with black-and-white illustrations and duotone covers, themselves based on the acclaimed catalogues of the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings Collection, produced (with admirable speed) in the 1970s. However, sales of these catalogues – which each cost over £150 – have been low, being mainly confined to institutions, and it is an expensive and old-fashioned way of disseminating information about the collections. New editions are unlikely, so new information, which is being constantly acquired, cannot be added to the entries.

On taking over as Director of the museum in May 2005, I was anxious to make its catalogues more useful, appealing and commercially viable. We initially explored the possibilities of producing books with a more attractive format and colour illustrations, reproducing all the drawings in an accompanying CD-ROM so as to cut down on the need for long descriptive captions. However, the proposed improvements made publication even more expensive – both to produce and to buy.