Photograph: Nicholas Calcott. Aside from its deep Victorian condescension, this idea was fairly novel. The earliest European museums, most of which date back to the mid to late 18th century, did not require storerooms: their collections were typically displayed in their entirety. The division that Gray suggested between curated public displays and separate storage facilities for study and preservation was prescient.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, has a collection of more than two million items, of which it displays around five per cent. The British Museum shows only one per cent. Should scholars wish to inspect items in storage, most museums can facilitate a supervised visit. The general public, by contrast, is left to scroll online inventories that may or may not be fully photographed and catalogued.
It is a situation that speaks to a fundamental contradiction in what museum institutions perceive their mission to be. But this obligation is often scuppered by the sheer quantities of museum items held in storage, a situation resulting from the collecting and preservation efforts that are also part of the museum definition. Museums have grappled with this paradox for more than a century — not least spatially. A new building opened the same year, designed with this programmatic distinction in mind.
Two clerks in a 19th-century Manhattan office, seemingly checking copy. The Architectural Review , No. That was to change. More recently, it is the architectural community — especially the more academically minded parts of it — that has embraced Bartleby.
What to make of this? As ever, it is helpful to return to the original text. Its protagonist is not, in fact, Bartleby but his employer — an unnamed narrator — who recounts the story of the recalcitrant scrivener and reveals a great deal about himself, and the economic model he represents, by doing so. Helping him draw up these documents are scriveners, whose gruelling task it is to produce four handwritten copies of each of the lengthy legal texts, non-stop, six days a week.
