Day 10 – Scandals and Statues

“The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.” –Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man

Victoria and Albert National Art Library – https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/national-art-library

Today we saw the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Everything we were shown had been looked at by the book conservation team before it was shown to us.  One of the more impressive pieces we were shown was Shakespeare’s First Folio (they have 3 copies).  From 1623, this Folio includes all 32 of his plays together and sections them into comedies, histories, and tragedies.  Often, books of this age need to be housed in a protective covering.  These can be time consuming to create but this library has a machine that can create custom book boxes by entering the necessary dimensions.  Books and documents are stored in locked cases and the keys to those can only be accessed from a fingerprint scan safe.

The National Art Library used to consist of 3 rooms, but one is currently used as a gallery.  It is one of the top 4 art libraries in the world and serves as a public library, a library for the museum staff to aid in their work, and a curatorial department.  They also have 17 different storage locations to properly house their collection of around a million books.  Despite this, if an off-site item is requested it can make it to the library within an hour and a half. 

Safety of the items is an important aspect in every library.  At the National Art Library, the staff are all trained in salvage operations.  Sadly, they recently lost a bay of books due to weather complications.  However, that has spurred the museum to work on fixing the roof, so this does not happen again.  Many of the staff members are also fire marshals.

We were also told a story about their recent encounter with an art scammer.  A few years back they had some of their items seized by Scotland Yard.  A man had been selling fake materials with fake provenances for high prices.  He was only discovered after his wife turned him in as a response to his unfaithfulness in their marriage.  Now, several of the staff are experts on forgeries.

After seeing the library, we toured the rest of the museum.  One of my favorite parts was getting to see many marble replicas of statues and monuments I had seen in Italy several years back.  There was so much to see that I could have stayed there forever.