Down in the crypt of the Victoria & Albert Museum there was, until recently, an in-house printing department, with typesetting, repro, a couple of Heidelbergs, print finishing, bindery and warehouse. The Museum’s bigger jobs, the books and major catalogues, were sent out, but in-house were produced many of the smaller publications, as well as visitors’ guides and maps, most of the publicity, and the labelling and signage around the galleries. This is where I worked for a while as photo-typesetter.
One day, a job came in of setting a batch of new labels for some of the plaster cast collection. I offered to take this on as the Cast Courts in the V&A are among my favourite galleries. They also form one of the earliest parts of the Museum. Their origins lie in the casts that were originally collected from the 1830s for sketching and drawing practice by students of the Government School of Design. This, with its collection, was taken over in 1852 by the Museum of Manufactures. The casts became a resource not only for students but as educational value for a population largely unable to travel to see the originals. The Museum continued to acquire casts of architectural and ornamental work from French and Italian Renaissance originals – the policy being later expanded to include figurative sculpture – until being eventually absorbed into the V&A, when the casts were housed in the Museum’s splendid cast courts, Rooms 46a and 46b.
The labels I was to set were at that time very different from the ubiquitous expository museum and gallery panels we now rely on to be able to see what is in front of us. The plaster cast labels were stripped back to the raw facts, not of the cast itself but its original: title, artist, medium, and place of origin. Not a mention of where the cast was made, or by whom. On the bottom line, each label carried a museum identification number, in the format year of acquisition – dash – serial number. The earliest label I found dated from 1857, and the most recent 1968. The quantities recorded each year reveal a steady flow of acquisitions during the Museum’s first fifty years, with fewer in the twentieth century, apart from dramatic spikes in 1916, and again in 1938. In both cases the cause was presumably a more acute awareness of the need to ensure that a copy at least would survive of some of the world’s irreplaceable sculptural and architectural treasures.
The catalogue numbers struck me as an economical shorthand for not only the casts but the originals – Trajan’s Column and Michelangelo’s David among them – from which they were taken. This gave me the idea for a small publication, a “Collectors’ Guide” titled Plaster Casts in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The model was the iconic Ian Allan train, bus and aeroplane “spotters” guides, some of which were sacred texts for a few years in my youth. I collected registration numbers avidly, and remember one of the most thrilling experiences of the time was to creep into a hangar which held small aeroplanes captive and out of their natural environment, exhibits held in a ghostly stillness. Perhaps something of that perversity attracted me to the plaster casts, the fake forms of greatness, out of context and warehoused in the great South Kensington hangars. In fact, to ensure I had a complete catalogue of all the plaster casts on display, I snooped around the cast courts with pencil and notebook, jotting down serial numbers, avoiding the suspicious looks from the security staff, very much as I had done in countless aeroplane sheds twenty-five or more years before.
My take on the spotters’ guide reduced it to its simplest form: on each page is a table with two columns, the first listing the plaster casts’ catalogue numbers, in numerical order, the second left blank for collectors to fill in the details of “where and when seen”. I set the text on the wonderful Scantext phototypesetter, and ran the edition off on the office photocopier in my lunch hour. It is a sixteen-page booklet in A7 format, meaning that all the pages are from a single sheet of A4 paper, printed both sides, cut and folded into eight, and stapled into a card cover.
I liked the parallels of the Museum’s “Collection” with the visitor’s own experience of collecting observations and impressions, forming visual imprints of each of the items in the collection as a whole, and how that relates to the way the physical and visual encounter the “spotter” has with one of his or her subject of interest is condensed to a cipher, a serial number or a museum acquisition number, to be marked off in a register. The twist is the “where seen” element: the contrast between the shadow visit to so many exotic destinations in Europe, where the originals remain, and the reality of each and every entry being filled out with a uniform “London, SW7”.