The Forelog (as opposed to The Prologue)

The backlog is what you come back to when you’ve been away, the forelog is what you have to work through before you go (a useful phrase gathered from someone from the publishing trade that we once met on holiday – thank you, Elizabeth). As I’m working at home for a few days consequent upon having a ‘minor procedure’ on my right foot (permanent removal of nail on big toe) (for the second time), I did have a forelog this week.

A large chunk of it consisted of preparatory work for the annual mini audit of the collections: basically, on a notified day, Records Section pick fifty objects at close of play and then come to us next day to see whether those objects (a) are where the record says they are (b) carry a museum number and (c) have a full record. Hours of fun for all concerned…well, it is of course a very important thing to do, and at least we no longer have to do the whole collection every five years. It’s at times like this that the quality (or otherwise) of the computerised record really shows up, though - when you have literally dozens of examples of something on a shelf, ‘Doll, German, 19th century’ isn’t a lot of use, although there are often fuller records in the old registers. Probably the least helpful one we’ve come across so far consisted of the single word ‘Christmas’…

I also had the usual routine things like e-mails and phone calls to respond to, and finished off the day with an interesting challenge, which fell to me to answer as the longest-serving member of staff. Our shop manageress came to find me as she had a customer who had last come to London as a child about twenty five years ago and remembered her grandfather taking her to see a doll exhibition in a museum. But was it our museum she had visited? After a quick look in the exhibitions files (we had two doll exhibitions in the 1980s, apart from the fact that many people can’t differentiate between temporary exhibitions and permanent displays) I went up to see the visitor. It turned out that the museum she had visited had had a carousel in the grounds – not ours, then. I suggested that it was most likely that she had visited the London Toy and Model Museum. “A very tall narrow house full of toys and dolls, near Paddington Station – it had lots of stairs, and you would have had to climb up and down between four floors, from recollection”. “Yes, it was a house – and just as you describe – I’d forgotten the stairs”. That’s the difference between our ages on visiting – her ten year old legs barely noticed, my thirtyish ones were already complaining. Sadly, I couldn’t send her off for a re-visit, as it no longer exists: an independent museum, its owners eventually sold it, and the collections went to Japan, while the house is probably worth six fortunes on the property market even now. But at least these days it’s quite likely that somewhere on the Web she’ll find some references, or other people who remember the place.