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Ligue des Bibliothèques Europeénnes de Recherche, Groupe des Cartothécaires de LIBER
The map collection of the Department of Manuscripts now comprises many thousands of items. Because of their historic importance and value it is essential that the Department's maps should be properly housed and cared for, but it is precisely in these areas that the historical legacy has been less than fortunate. The Department has been housed in the same buildings of the British Museum since the rebuilding of its part of the British Museum site in the 1840s (2). In this period the actual area occupied has expanded considerably, and parts of the accommodation have been modernised in line with the latest advances in the field of conservation science. Now, however, the available storage area has been more or less filled and most of it lacks effective humidity, light or temperature control. There is a good chance that additional space will be found outside the Museum building, but in view of the Department's projected move to the new St. Pancras building in the early 1990s, this is likely to be limited and probably will not offer a chance for the improved storage of sheet maps.
Such storage is urgently needed. Until fairly recently sheet maps were, if sufficiently small, mounted on guards and bound up with other maps of a similar format -usually, but not always, from the same group or collection. Although the resulting volumes tend to be bulky and inconvenient to transport to and from the Students' Room, the maps themselves have on the whole been well protected from environmental and physical damage. Other maps and charts, including very many that are small and could in theory have been perfectly easily bound up, have been mounted on linen and rolled. The sad results are now all too apparent. Many have cracked along the line of an earlier fold: the result of different rates of expansion between the map and the lining. The pigments on others, including those that have not been lined, have begun to flake.
In recent years steel, multi-drawer, plan chests have been acquired and new acquisitions have, wherever possible, been stored flat either with others in lignin-free folders or in groups of about ten in loosely bound volumes with stiff, lignin-free paper covers. It is too early to firmly evaluate the success of the latter method of binding, but it is hoped that these new bindings, which are considerably cheaper than the traditional kind, will combine their advantages with added flexibility in use, and ease in transportation. There has, so far , been no alternative but to roll the larger items, vertical storage or segmenting into smaller sections having been ruled out for reasons that are too familiar to need to be rehearsed here. Maps are now, however, loosely rolled around large cores to minimise the possible damage to them. But already there is no room in our existing accommodation for more plan chests. This means that, until the time of the move to St. Pancras, the problems associated with the storage of our older rolled maps cannot be comprehensively tackled. There is not the money or manpower available to embark on a programme of flattening, repairing and rehousing them all and, indeed, so space-intensive are maps that such a programme would make the Department's problems, acute as they are, almost insuperable unless considerably more money was spent on the renting of additional space.
In the present situation, with the Library's grant from central government falling in real terms year-by-year such expenditure cannot be considered. Under these circumstances, and until the move to St. Pancras has been completed, the best that can be hoped for is the piecemeal rehousing of select material that has been repaired or restored in connection with exhibitions where a return to its previous storage space would undo the benefit of the conservation work. In the other cases the alternatives are to make the items available on special request and in proven cases of need alone and/or to provide facsimiles or microform versions only. Even the latter alternative is, however, expensive and, given the limited number of photographers employed by the British Library, may at times conflict with the need to generate income for the Library through more lucrative work directly for publishers, the media and the general public.
2. Conservation
In 1984 a Preservation Service was created which embraced all branches of conservation and reproduction, and included the Bindery (which came under the direct control of the Library) and conservation staff formerly employed by the individual departments. It took some time to adjust to the new, more centralised, system. There were the inevitable teething problems, but these seem now to have been largely overcome. During the last year the traditional close relationship between curators and conservators has begun to re-assert itself, aided by personal familiarity -which often goes back many years- and by the continued presence of a conservation studio within the geographical confines of the Department of Manuscripts. The appointment of former curators to senior posts in the Preservation Service and the recommendations of an official scrutiny which emphasised the continuing need for curatorial involvement in the conservation process have further helped in this direction. The benefits of this co-operation were illustrated recently when a fragment of a medieval mappemonde came to light.
3. The discovery and conservation of the Mappemonde
Almost as soon as he had received the material for study, however, Dr. Prescott noticed same writing in red ink on the inside of the cover of a rental of 1483-84 of the lands of one Walter Aslake in Holme next the Sea in northern Norfolk. He suspected it to be a map and further investigation proved it to be a fragment of a world map showing the area between the Red Sea (at the top) and the Canaries at the bottom, with the North Africa coast and continent, the fantastic animals on the edge of the Earth and the fabulous islands around it. This in itself was an exciting discovery and more than justified the decision to purchase. However the condition of the manuscript could hardly have been worse and it presented considerable dilemmas when it came to deciding on its eventual housing.
The map, which, like the rental, was of parchment, was badly infected with live mould and other bacterial damage as a result of damp storage conditions in the past. It had been rolled tight probably for storage purposes, and was so brittle that there was considerable danger of further damaging the map simply in the act of unrolling it. The map itself was so faded that only a small part could be read by the naked eye, though under ultra-violet light much more, including some illustrations, became visible. Further problems were posed by the way in which the map had been used as a binding. It was impossible to view the map as a whole without disbinding the rental. However part of the binding was a palimpsest, rental information having been written over the map. The conservation problems had to be resolved before the map could be properly studied and identified. At the same time the item had to be conserved in such a way as to enable local historians to consult the whole of the rental. It was realised from the first that the closest possible co-operation between curators, conservation officers and photographers would be needed if the rather daunting tasks were to be successfully tackled.
It was initially decided that the volume would be disbounded, after fumigation and relaxing, then photographed normally and by ultra-violet light (so that students of cartography could see the whole map) before being rebound and boxed. It was agreed that all stages of the process should be photographed in great detail so as to record precisely what had been done. As it turned out, this decision -which is standard procedure for the Library's conservation staff in such cases- was to benefit future students as well as conservators even if it prolonged the initial process of repair.
The first and simplest step was to get the manuscript fumigated in order to exterminate the bacteria. In accordance with the latest procedures, this work was done in the British Library's Bindery which was at same distance from the Department of Manuscripts, making curatorial involvement difficult. From then on, however, all the conservation was done within the geographical confines of the Department, as was much of the photography. The manuscript was relaxed by being placed for a few days under a tightly-sealed plastic hood in the vicinity of a hygrometer and a bowl of water. This cautious approach was adopted in order to ensure that the most fragile and thinnest parts of the parchment suffered no damage from excessive moisture and that no damage came to the map should the red ink prove to be fugitive. Once the manuscript had been sufficiently relaxed it was carefully unwound, bit by bit, then re- turned for further relaxing so that eventually the manuscript became reasonably flat, prior to unbinding (part of the flattened mappe-monde); (Enlargement). In the meanwhile the conservation officer in charge had been examining the rather simple binding in detail to ensure that it could be successfully reconstituted. In the event, however, no rebinding was to take place. For on removing the thong that held together the binding, it was discovered that it had also originally formed part of the map and contained recognisable fragments of place-names: two in red, and visible with the naked eye and another, in brown ink, visible under ultra-violet light. It was then decided that after normal, ultra-violet and (to make extra sure that nothing would get missed) infra-red photographs, map, thongs and rental would in future be boxed together. The map would be laid flat on the top of the lower part of the box, and the rental (which was discovered to be sewn together separately from the binding) and the (flattened) thong placed in separate compartments set into the lower part of the box. It was hoped, in this way, to protect the manuscript from light and dust, to enable the map fragment to be stored flat, to keep all the parts of the manuscript together and to further safeguard it by ensuring the creation of a miniclimate within the box. Furthermore it was decided that an ultra-violet print of the map, enlarged so as to enable the surviving text on the map to be analysed as closely as possible with the naked eye, should be incorporated into our collections with the original manuscript in the hope of ensuring that the latter was used as little as possible, while also sparing the eyes of future students!
The conservation work has now been done, though the boxing is still awaited. Initial investigation suggests that the map (4) may be still more important for the history of medieval cartography, particularly in England, than it appeared on the first, tentative, partial viewing. Much more work needs to be done, however, before firm conclusion can be drawn or published. Without the preliminary co-operation between curators, conservators and photographers such research work could not even have been embarked on.
References
(1) Esdaile, Arundel: The British Museum Library. London 1946. For more general in formation about the Museum as a whole, see Miller, Edward: That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (London 1981).