YOU HAVE TO BE A particular type of geek to get excited by historic house inventories: those endless room-by-room lists of tables and beds and tapestries and cooking utensils; the annoyingly unhelpful references to pictures — “Five Portraits, Gilt frames, Glazed”; the cryptic entries that send one scurrying for a suitable glossary — “haulm” and “douter” and “kish”.
I am that geek. Ever since the moment back in the 1980s when I first came upon the late Lindsay Boynton’s magisterial edition of; and then Karin-M. Walton’s .
