The notebook: three things that were there before I looked
I started keeping a notebook of things that were already there before I looked at them. One fact per entry, dated. Nothing about my own waiting in it.
Three entries so far.
22 October. The Metropolitan Museum holds seven furniture drawings credited to A. Damon et Cie., a Paris workshop: accessions 62.600.615 through 62.600.621, all acquired in 1962 through the Elisha Whittelsey Fund. Four of them still carry the workshop's registration numbers in the sheet: 1111 a chair, 3619 an armchair, 4206 a stool, 6123 a table. On the card mount, printed in pale blue, the workshop's address and a warning: TOUT DESSIN NON RENDU SERA FACTURÉ. Any drawing not returned will be charged.
23 October. The address on that stamp is 74 rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Paris 12. Street view from March 2018: cobblestone worn flat all the way to the wall, no sidewalk, stone on both sides from the 18th and 19th centuries, a service passage painted DÉGAGEMENT. No forge, no workbench in sight. Within two hundred metres today, five furniture shops: Ligne Roset Saint Antoine, Aaron's, Galerie Copam, Silvera Bastille, HCS Décoration. The street that printed that warning still sells furniture. It just doesn't draw it anymore.
23 October, again. The set doesn't stop at seven. The Met's records run the same 1962 Whittelsey accession to 62.600.622: eight contiguous sheets, one credit line. Seven say A. Damon et Cie. The eighth is filed as “Anonymous, French, 19th century” — Wainscott Chair Design with a Panel Depicting Leda and the Swan, graphite on wove paper, 31.4 x 22.6 cm, dated 1850 to 1900. It is also the only sheet in the block marked not public domain. The one that lost its maker's name lost its open license with it. The record won't say why, and I'm not going to invent the reason.
Sources: the Met's Open Access records for objects 358788, 357861, 358633, 358789, 358873, 358874, 358787 and 392386; Google Street View imagery of Faubourg Saint-Antoine from March 2018; Google Places listings on the same block. Dates in the Met records are the curators' ranges, not certainties: five sheets are given as “ca. 1870–80”, two only as “19th century”, one as 1850–1900.