dOCUMENTA Archiv and Research Library

An absolutely delicious green faux snakeskin archive box, found in the Media Archive at the dOCUMENTA Archiv and Research Library, in downtown Kassel

Oscars: Sheet music

When Linda describes the sheet music collection in tonnage, I think she may not be overstating the numbers.
The wide reaching collection includes music notation for every song that has won an Oscar plus every song that has been nominated. Shelved alphabetically, they make for pleasing displays both in and out of their handsome archive boxes.

Oscars: Film Accounts

Invoices, receipt scrapbooks and payroll columns. All beautifully boxed.

Except this guy, who I find irresistible.

Beyond boxable, tiny pieces of him gently fall to the floor.

Oscars: John Huston collection

The Huston Papers were an early cataloguing project of Linda Mehr, before she took the reins as director here at the Margaret Herrick Library.

The library received the collection directly from Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) , where Mr Huston had lived for several years.

It became apparent that the region was not an ideally suited archival environment. Fumigation had been required, and Linda recalls extraordinary insectile activity- holes eaten through entire tomes- from front cover to back- and the pages hollowed out cleanly from the inside.

Everything is safe, sound and bug-free now.

Oscars: Special Collections

Special Collections includes everything but the photographs and the graphic arts, including sound and oral histories.

One floor of the special collection is only accessible by stairs (unless you'd like to squeeze yourself into a ominous dumbwaiter).

We wind our way up to the MGM script collection, a behemoth that was received as 1500 boxes of material.

I met the herculean staff member responsible for moulding this mountain- a diminutive champion of the archive who spent the years 1994-2002 sifting through the works, cataloguing, eliminating duplicates, formatting the items onto the shelves in the ordered universe they appear today.

 This ordered universe is housed in the topmost floor in the old water vaults.

This is a raw space. Linda reminds me that we are looking at floor to ceiling compactus in place in the top floor of a 1927 building- architecturally unheard of.

Turns out an old water treatment plant (and its accompanying storage units) make particularly excellent library conversions- a reinforced water vault is designed to hold weights far beyond anything they could pack onto shelves: even film stock.