maeve tuesday june 27th

Today in the archives, I attempted to make some more headway on Umlauff's catalogues, using Dr. Zuberi's object lists to inform my research. I struggled to read the catalogues as they are not only old, they are in German, and handwritten. After a long time struggling to make out the letters and translate some words I saw over and over again in the catalogues, I discovered that German has its own cursive alphabet written quite differently from the English one. After lunch, I was finally able to identify the words for "wood" and "ivory" a few times. Hardly anything is noted in the catalogues, and a translated version of them I found online lists their date of publication as 1914, two years after the museum made the big 1912 purchase. I'm not sure Umlauff's catalogues are going to be productive at all, so I'm going to move onto his correspondence with Gordon to see if Gordon describes the objects he wants to purchase anywhere.

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