THE PAPER CHASE
13
study I am down in cellars or up in attics ransacking their contents for yet more documents. And when I light upon them—especially on the choicer specimens—I probably make delighted chuckling sounds in my throat like Ben Gunn discovering a cheese.
And what is an archives repository like? Well, externally, to fit the popular conception of things archival, it ought to be neo-gothic in style, rather like a 19th century English provincial railway station. Internally, though, and my hostess would be much certain of this, it would look more like a derelict warehouse, its floors piled with books and papers, evidently in the utmost confusion and, of course, covered with a thick mantle of dust (Dust is always an important feature in the myths about us). And, strangely enough, considering the archivist's obsessive love for fascinating old documents, they would be swarming with vermin.
Grotesque as it is, this image of the archivist and his work is all too common. In this regard we carry a burden not unlike the one which archaeologists once laboured under. Was it so long ago that the archaeologist was invariably depicted, and thought of, as a spindly, eccentric looking apparition, clad in a solar topee, bush jacket and Bombay bloomers, devoted to all things arcane, and eternally and promiscuously ferreting in the sand for relics of the past—any relics? Old films of the “Mummy's Curse” variety usually reflected this impression of him perfectly.
But thanks initially to the unwitting cooperation of Tut Ankh Amen and to the literary efforts of people like Leonard Wooley and Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the archaeologist has sloughed off most of his comic attributes these days and emerged as a familiar and even heroic figure, just as anthropologists are doing through the influence of writers like Thor Heyerdahl.
Shall archivists produce their Wooleys and Wheelers to introduce the real archivist and his profession to the public? I fear not. Our profession is eminently free from danger—unless being caught between two stacks of mobile shelving can be thought of as dangerous—and however fascinating archival work may be for archivists themselves one has to admit that it is singularly lacking in the sort of features which make exciting reading for the man in the street.
There will never be a best-seller about archivology, and if popular misconceptions about us are ever to be dispelled it will probably come about only through archivists persistently reading papers like this one to captive audiences.