UCLA Library

The nineteenth-century appetite for plaster cast reproductions of architecture and sculpture is still evident in a handful of museums in the United States and England: London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, and New York's Institute for Classical Architecture. But in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, antiquarians intent on understanding the Classical world, souvenir hunters on the Grand Tour, and wealthy landowners looking to fill their homes and gardens with cultural cache, also collected plaster casts. One such person, John Soane (1753-1837), depended on plaster casts to fulfill some of the same functions as a descriptive bibliography does today.In A New Introduction to Bibliography, Philip Gaskell stated that “there is no reason to confine bibliography to literary texts. All documents...are the bibliographer’s province; and it may be added that the aims and procedures of bibliography apply not only to written and printed books but also to any document...where production is involved and variant versions may result.” Suzanne Briet successfully argued that anything could be a document, including an antelope in a zoo. If an antelope is a document and bibliography can be applied to any kind of document, and a document can be anything, the possibilities become infinite. I will argue that plaster casts can also be considered within the bibliographer’s wheelhouse. Sir John Soane’s eponymous London museum serves as a case study.