Marks of the Private

'Changed Press Marks of the Private Case'

Naomi Salaman 2001 .......reading in the British library in 1999, preparing to go to Naples to the National Archeological Museum, to make work about the original 'Secret Museum' housed there known as La Raccolta Pornografica. I was searching the catalogue of the British Library for books and catalogues related to the collection in Naples and as my requested books arrived at the desk, I kept finding pencil alterations made to the library reference numbers written inside the covers. Books to do with the Secret Museum had been catalogued in a reserved collection, but some of those titles have since been moved to a less restricted area. I collected these changed press marks in the books by photocopying the inside cover. I ended up with this strange meta collection - catalogue entries to books about the secret museum were themselves subject to restrictions, which have over time eased off, leaving, what was for me a fascinating remnant. I had to dig into the basement of the library to find out how/where they record these press mark changes.

In a library catalogue personal acts of thinking and organising are hidden behind systems. The pencil marks were for me a very clear indication that somebody had made the decision about how to classify the books. The pencil marks were also a sign of a way of doing something that was itself in a process of change.

As I was researching this material, I was sitting in the new location for the British Library, housed in a new building in Euston Rd. The huge catalogue and the book ordering system had become computerised, and the library had internet access as well as other on-line services. These things seem quite normal now, but at the time it felt like my access to information was being thoroughly restructured, and I wanted to mark that change some how, to record the older system in some way, to make a work which could reference this access to information by numbers and letters, as a historical, political, gendered process of unevenness and difference - not simply a technological motor way of inevitability.