Page:The museum, (Jackson, Marget Talbot, 1917).djvu/204

174 the selection of the ink, as ordinary inks eat the paper of the print. Windsor and Newton's sepia oil color has been used instead of ink. It is important that the ink should contain no aniline dye and that it should be spread evenly on a glass plate before being used, to avoid lumps and thick spots in the marking. Space is usually left in this stamp where the accessions number can be added in pencil. The custom of using pencil for this purpose seems to be due to the fact that every large print collection expects to be able to sell or exchange duplicates when it acquires a better example of any work. This is not done in any other branch of art museum work though it is more or less customary in scientific museums. The pencilled number can be easily erased and should, of course, be removed before the print leaves the museum's collection.

The next step is the mounting. The Print Department of the British Museum and the Kupferstich Kabinet in Berlin are the two collections that have paid the most attention to this side of the work, and the "British Museum board," a mounting board specially prepared, free from substances harmful to prints, is the standard everywhere. It is, however, very expensive and most of the American collections content themselves with using one of the mounting boards put on the market