16.10: The Power and Potential of the 'Real Thing'

Despite the possibilities offered by digital and other techniques for capturing, studying and read- ing virtual texts, the real thing is still valued and conserved. Significant examples of writing such as Dickens’ novels are normally considered important for their content, and are available in recent or current print so most of us may never see the original handwritten or printed book ‘in the flesh’ (though it is now possible to see many texts on-line). However, the originals are conserved as the primary evidence of the author’s work, and for the information they provide about how they were written, such as how the story evolved, and how often the text was revised (e.g. the first draft of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby — see British Library 2009b).

The impact of the real thing was amply demonstrated by the exhibition held at the British Library in 2009, entitled Taking Liberties: The struggle for Britain’s freedoms and rights. Almost all of the documents displayed have been widely distributed in later print but libraries and archives have conserved the originals. Displayed together, their materiality (parchment, papers of all kinds and sizes, inks, varied handwriting, and early printing) told an evocative story of attempts to secure and retain British liberties. The exhibition earned enthusiastic reviews from people moved by seeing the original documents (Ashley 2008; Taking Liberties 2009). The value attached to the ‘real thing’ gives particularly poignant emphasis to the tragedy of the collapse of the Cologne archive building in 2009 and the feared loss of many early documents (Icon 2009a; International Institute for Conservation 2009a).

An often quoted example of the reverence shown for the ‘real thing’ is the extraordinary conservation protection given to the American Declaration of Independence which is on view in the US National Archives. Since 1951 it had been protected from the damaging effects of oxygen by being sealed in an atmosphere of helium; more recently its casing has been redesigned and it is now housed in a highly sophisticated protective frame containing humidified argon (American Declaration of Independence 2009). Similar reverence is shown for the Magna Carta. In 2009 the four remaining copies of the first version (dated to 1215) were inscribed into the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Lincoln Cathedral’s copy is the only one of the four which is allowed to travel, and almost as much protection is given to it as to the Declaration of Independence (Icon 2009b). Of course this is a level of preservation and protection that can be accorded to only very few documents.