Dates, and things
Jan. 16th, 2012 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xenithWhen I read the letter from the previous post (Trench Orders), I took it to be from World War II, until I glanced at the envelope. Oops. Admittedly, it's handwritten on a plain type of paper but I'm not usually that far off. I'm getting pretty good at dating manuscripts and books.
Objects, generally not. I can find books and guides that say when certain material or styles came into use. I can match worn hall marks to images in books. I can look up manufacturers' addresses in the newspapers. But it's only ever an educated guess. Unless I can get confirmation from at least two sources (provenance + style, hall mark + manufacturer's name) then I never felt confident putting a date to objects. This is complicated because I am poor at identifying materials. (I have told the story of the fake tortoiseshell glasses?) This is for the same reason: because I don't know what I'm handling, I can't pick up the clues that let me identify it. I can handle all the "yellow metal" objects I like, but I don't know if they're brass or bronze or something else. But silver I can usually tell, because I've handled objects I know are silver from their hallmarks. Plastic? Bone? I don't know. And add to this that, um, certain materials don't age noticably so it's all very confusing.
But printed materials and manuscripts? They usually come with a date, and after a while I've come to associate particular paper types, writing styles, photo printing, bindings, layouts, decorations with certain periods. I can't always deliberately give something a date (except for books, they have more clues), but when I pick something up, I know what date range to expect or if a date given by a 3rd party is wrong. (I should add, when I grumble about the lack of a century on a date, it's not because I don't know the century--if I can't tell an 1830 manuscript from a 1930 manuscript by now, I shouldn't be doing this--but because I can't tell if I'm looking at a date. The beginning of the 20th C is particularly difficult for this. Is 12-1-16 a date or a price or a sorting code? In the first decade, they didn't always include the 0, so I'm looking at looking at some ledgers and wondering why nothing was dated, then I realised 23/1/7 WAS a date. Bah.)
Of course, sometimes I get caught out. I have my own assumptions about things, that are not always right. A "spirit-copy" of a typed invoice would be from... 1905? Uh. A bound cheque book would be from, um, 1869?? It's a learning process.
This is important, to me, because it's a matter of confidence in what I know. With the first realisation that I could date these things with some degree of accuracy, came another realisation that I knew what I was doing. That was a while back. As I learn more about that strange place called the past from the contents of the manuscripts, I'm also getting better at putting dates on them. I am good.
Objects, generally not. I can find books and guides that say when certain material or styles came into use. I can match worn hall marks to images in books. I can look up manufacturers' addresses in the newspapers. But it's only ever an educated guess. Unless I can get confirmation from at least two sources (provenance + style, hall mark + manufacturer's name) then I never felt confident putting a date to objects. This is complicated because I am poor at identifying materials. (I have told the story of the fake tortoiseshell glasses?) This is for the same reason: because I don't know what I'm handling, I can't pick up the clues that let me identify it. I can handle all the "yellow metal" objects I like, but I don't know if they're brass or bronze or something else. But silver I can usually tell, because I've handled objects I know are silver from their hallmarks. Plastic? Bone? I don't know. And add to this that, um, certain materials don't age noticably so it's all very confusing.
But printed materials and manuscripts? They usually come with a date, and after a while I've come to associate particular paper types, writing styles, photo printing, bindings, layouts, decorations with certain periods. I can't always deliberately give something a date (except for books, they have more clues), but when I pick something up, I know what date range to expect or if a date given by a 3rd party is wrong. (I should add, when I grumble about the lack of a century on a date, it's not because I don't know the century--if I can't tell an 1830 manuscript from a 1930 manuscript by now, I shouldn't be doing this--but because I can't tell if I'm looking at a date. The beginning of the 20th C is particularly difficult for this. Is 12-1-16 a date or a price or a sorting code? In the first decade, they didn't always include the 0, so I'm looking at looking at some ledgers and wondering why nothing was dated, then I realised 23/1/7 WAS a date. Bah.)
Of course, sometimes I get caught out. I have my own assumptions about things, that are not always right. A "spirit-copy" of a typed invoice would be from... 1905? Uh. A bound cheque book would be from, um, 1869?? It's a learning process.
This is important, to me, because it's a matter of confidence in what I know. With the first realisation that I could date these things with some degree of accuracy, came another realisation that I knew what I was doing. That was a while back. As I learn more about that strange place called the past from the contents of the manuscripts, I'm also getting better at putting dates on them. I am good.
