Earlier this year, in the Special Collections section at the Boston Public Library, they had a little problem. Someone misplaced works by Rembrandt and famed German artist Albrecht Dürer, valued at roughly $650,000. Except you don't really know that at first, do you? It's not like misplacing the car keys or the television remote.
A scandal broke out, leading to the firings of two leading figures at the library. But as misplaced things are tend to be, the art was found nearby, roughly eighty feet away from where they should have been in a massive warehouse. This small oversight has led the entire collection to be inventoried for the first time in the library's history.
Led by Simmons College professor Dr. Martha Mahard and a team of stud----wait, wait, wait----the library never got around to this before now??? It's been a bastion of Boston for 167 years, and no one paused to say, "Hey, Joe, at some point, let's keep track of where Emily Dickinson's poems are or where those Winslow Homer prints might be, okay?"
According to Fox25 in Boston (which has a video of all that excitable behind the scenes inventory action), Mahard is delightfully happy at the process.
"We keep hitting things that we didn’t expect," Mahard said. "The kinds of things where we open a box. You think it’s going to be 20 prints and it’s 150 that aren’t in mattes."
((((head in hands))))
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