..and not a drop of ink to spare. A quick digression about some unexpected UK archives…
I’ve long been a fan of the M25 Consortium: no, it’s not some wryly-named Croydon-based arts collective, but a searchable multi-library catalogue, a bit like a WorldCat for Londonista academics. However, until today I didn’t know that there are other parallel meta-catalogues under broadly the same geographical aegis.
For example, the fairly unsnappily-titled Masc25 (short for “Mapping Access to Special Collections in the London Region”) is a work-in-progress über-catalogue of special collections around London (though quite how the University of Brighton fits in to the scheme is anyone’s guess).
Also, the (slightly more amusingly named) AIM25 (“Archives In London and the M25 area”) is designed to help you find archive collections (the correct term is actually a [singular] “fonds“) in the London area.
On a slightly grander level, the Manchester-based Archives Hub tries to do much the same kind of thing… but for the whole UK. There are some gems, such as the National Fairground Archive, and the Upware Republic Society (an independent state founded in a Cambridge pub): though I’m not nearly so sure about the collection of sheep ear-marks, nor the Algal memoirs (but perhaps they’ll grow on me). Overall, what is particularly good is the very detailed level of information that often appears here – so hooray for that!
By way of comparison, the grand-daddy of UK fonds finding aids is simply the National Register of Archives: though search results from this do occasionally really hit the mark, it has to be said that they often fall short – simply because it has such wide coverage (as opposed to deep). But what can you do?
“how the University of Brighton fits in to the scheme is anyone’s guess” – the M25 Consortium has been expanding for some time now and includes many HE institutions which are outside of the M25 including Brighton, Sussex, Reading, Canterbury Christ Church, Anglia Ruskin etc. See http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/contact_us/6.html
Archives!?
I often feel like I have no sense of what is to be found out there in the archive world. I feel like there must be an archive outside of Italy with plenty of documents that would interest me, but I have no idea what or where that archive is or if it exists. Ekaterina Domnina’s Sforza enciphered letter in a Moscow archive proves that interesting documents can find their way anywhere.(There could even be something in the Bodleian or other libraries in Oxford.)
The Voynich was in a Jesuit library supposedly, which wouldn’t have factored high on my list as to somewhere to look for early 15th century ciphers.
I have learnt quite a bit about archives, but I feel like I still have a lot to learn.
It almost feels like documents are particles which are randomly displaced to various locations without obvious reason as to why they ended up there. And therefore discerning where to look for such particles is very difficult. In addition the destruction or survival of documents due to unpredictable events makes this even more difficult. So predetermining where to look for given documents seems unclear.
M R Knowles: Now you’re cooking with gas, no one else amongst the Rene C14 faithful are known to use that doubting ‘supposedly’ word with abandon. Me thinks it’s highly probable that Wilfred picked up on the name Montdragone his brief association with Manuel Montdragon the Mexican at the Manhatten hotel in late 1914, on that wealthy fellow book collector’s way into a Belgian exile.
Mark –
Have you read this pdf?
https://ep.liu.se/ecp/149/007/ecp18149007.pdf
Diane: Yes, that was the paper I was referring to.
John Sanders: I used the word “supposedly” as I understand that there is some degree of uncertainty as to whether that is really where Wilfred Voynich found the manuscript.