The Archivist

People in boxes. I have them all over the house. Some of them are starting to smell.

What's an archivist to do?

It wasn't always like this. The collecting wasn't always such an obsession. And please, don't misunderstand. These are real people, in real boxes, inside my house. It isn't even a huge six-bedroomed detached and rambling pile of a house, all peeling paint and stuccoed walls with a fake turret and a veranda right the way around, and a driveway leading up to it overgrown with bushes and trees. It's a small, modern, three-bedroomed mid-terrace property, with gardens front and rear, separate garage, and small porch to front.

Don't I sound like an estate agent? I'm not, but I have one here, somewhere among my collection. What started out as a joke has now become something of an obsession, I'm afraid. It irks me to have to leave the house and go to work, but my collection doesn't make me any money. The only thing that lessens the frustration is that going out to work brings me into contact with all kinds of people. I'd like to preserve one of each kind.

My first specimen is my favourite. He's the one who started all of this. His uniqueness. We all agreed, during the short time that he worked with us at the museum, that he was a truly unique individual. His style of dress, his quaintly old fashioned views about the world, his desires, his dislikes, his manner of expressing himself. All of these things simultaneously fascinated and repelled us.

I wish that I could say that putting him into a box was my idea, but that would be a lie. I am many things, but a liar is not one of them, and I believe that credit must be given where it is due. In this instance, the credit belongs to the curator of community history. Who else, of course, could come up with the idea? To put someone, a member of our working community, into a box could only have come from her mind.

Except, she had wanted to encase him in perspex as a punishment for slurping on his carton of juice too loudly one lunchtime. As I said, I am not a liar, and every word of this is the truth.

It was shortly after this that I began to think in terms of creating a collection. People fascinate me. Their psychology, behaviours, styles of dress. And the way they think they are the norm against which the rest of us must be measured.

My plan at first was to keep things simple. I would collect people by describing them on paper. I would devise a classification scheme: fonds, series, sub-series, file and item. I would interact with the specimens who interested me the most, and compile facts about who they were, what they believed, how they behaved. Finally, I would catalogue them, separating them out into their different groups, creating record after record of every type you could hope to encounter on this planet.

I didn't get very far before I realised what would have been blindingly obvious to most people - even to me, had I not been so consumed by my desire to collect and describe and structure the human race. Cold facts on a page are no substitute for the living, breathing reality of the thing you are trying to describe.

That isn't to say that I have abandoned my catalogue. Far from it. Every collection needs an access point.

I still had the desire to collect, but now I realised that I needed to collect specimens of the thing I was trying to describe. It was then that I remembered my colleague's words: "If you don't stop slurping on your box-juice, I'm going to put you in a perspex box and feed you through a hatch in the top."

Bless her for giving me the very form and functionality of the box in which I would keep my specimens alive!

The place at which I am employed is not very good with money, so it was no trouble to convince the finance department that I would require a number of large perspex boxes, of varying sizes, in which to display items for a new collection. Technically, this was not a lie. I quickly obtained an approved purchase order.

The heritage sector is the perfect environment to find suppliers of display cases and storage solutions, and in no time at all I had myself a supplier who would create perspex boxes to a high spec based on the measurements with which I would from time to time provide them.

My very first addition to the collection was acquired the night his contract ended. I had already questioned him about certain important facts, and as I have good three dimensional judgement, I was able to have his box ready for him. I invited him to stay at my house after his leaving do - since I live closer to town than he did, he did not refuse.

I didn't even have to use anything to drug him or otherwise knock him out. He was so drunk, and fairly dopey by nature anyway, that on entering the house and seeing the box, he exclaimed with glee "Wow! A perspex box!" and stepped straight into it.

I could hardly believe my luck. The box was so designed that, once someone stepped inside, a pressure pad closed the door behind them and the self-locking mechanism engaged. There was no latch or other means of opening the box from the inside, and only I and the designer knew how to open the box from the outside.

I stood, amazed at how simple it had been, and watched him exploring the interior of his new home. Then I pulled myself together and got down to the job of making a few preliminary notes for the catalogue entry.

In the morning, when I came downstairs, he seemed a little dejected. Mindful of what had been the purpose of my colleague's original idea, I had been careful to ensure that the boxes would be soundproofed. I could not hear what he was saying (it appeared to be some sort of half angry, half frightened plea), nor could he hear me. I smiled and walked past him into the kitchen, where I prepared breakfast. I fed him through the special air-lock style hatch on the side of the box.

It took him a few hours to realise that I wasn't about to let him out of the box, and he was reluctant to eat at first, but by lunchtime his usual healthy appetite for food had returned.

And so he was the first, to be followed by many more, of different types, who interest me in different ways. But he remains my favourite because he was where it all began.

My one mistake was not to have considered the need for hygiene. I had provided no washing facilities, no means of clothes removal for cleaning, no opportunities for haircuts or other personal grooming.

That's why some of them are starting to smell. The ones that unfortunately died I simply deaccessioned and disposed of. They didn't fit in with the collecting policy. What else was I supposed to do?

©J R Hargreaves 2006