| Type | Consignment, mixed media |
|---|---|
| Received | Delivery slip, no consignor |
| Contents | Two reels, thirty-one prints |
| Status | Intermediate storage |
Deposit 14
1. Circumstances of receipt
Deposit 14 arrived at the annex on a delivery run whose slip bore no consignor field. The transport line was later cross-checked against forty other slips signed by Benjamin Grusson, but no match was found for this particular lot. It is treated, provisionally, as a mixed-media consignment rather than a single object, since it contains no unifying label, index or covering note.
2. Contents, first pass
An initial inventory (Annex 14-A) distinguishes three groups of material, catalogued separately because no internal reference ties them to one another beyond the shared crate.
2.1 Audio, reel one. A radio segment, undated but internally referenced to 3 May 2012, in which a presenter reads out a countdown of the hundred players judged most significant to the instrument's history. The tape is damaged past the fortieth position; what survives places a player named Sharrock near the top, with a Young, an Ulmer, a Frith, a Harrison and a Belew scattered through the surviving stretch, in an order the transcriber could not reconstruct with confidence. Whether the broadcast originated with the organisation or was simply recorded off-air by a previous holder is not established.
2.2 Audio, reel two. A shorter recording, roughly four minutes, of a comedian responding to a question that is itself inaudible. The reply consists of a flat statement that he has nothing further to say, followed by a run of puns turning on weight and largeness, delivered to muted laughter. No venue is named on the tape or in any accompanying note. The performer is not identified by any document in the deposit, and the organisation has not sought to identify him.
2.3 Photographic prints, thirty-one items. Colour prints from what appears to be a single studio session: a child seated before a decorated cake, photographed at intervals before, during and after the cake's destruction by hand. A stamp on the reverse of three prints reads, in full, a studio address in Montfort-l'Amaury. No invoice or client name is attached. The stamp has not been matched to any commercial register consulted by the survey.
3. Attempts at attribution
Annex 14-B records three lines of inquiry, none concluded.
The transport slip was compared, without success, against the delivery pattern otherwise associated with Benjamin Grusson; the handwriting does not match his known signature, and the route logged for that week does not correspond to any station covered under the Paired-service rule.
A working note by Capitana Shantel Dugua, circulated some months prior to the deposit's receipt, proposed reclassifying an unfinished audio survey under the working title "mixed programming," a phrase that appears nowhere on the tapes themselves but which the report notes as a possible, unconfirmed link.
The photographic prints were checked against the Route document on the theory that the studio session might correspond to an appendix figure requiring photographic verification; no correspondence was found, and the Route document itself remains unrecovered, so the comparison could not be completed.
4. Costing and classification
The deposit was costed under Nebula, the template carried forward from a prior survey and not adapted for mixed-media lots. This produced a budget line covering physical handling only; no allowance exists for tape transfer or print scanning, both of which were carried out under a separate authorisation not reflected in the original figure. The variance has been logged under the Consumables footprint rather than assigned to this deposit specifically, in keeping with that method's treatment of handling drift as ongoing rather than per-item.
5. Current status
Deposit 14 remains in intermediate storage pending a decision on whether its three components should be catalogued as one accession or three. No claimant has come forward. The audio reels have been duplicated; the prints have not, owing to their condition. The studio stamp is the only external reference point offered by any item in the lot, and it has not, as of this report, yielded further information.
6. Recommendation
That the deposit be held under its current provisional number for a further review period, and that no further comparison work be commissioned until either the transport origin or the studio identity is resolved by means external to this report.
See also
- Kilometre reading — Capitana Shantel Dugua, Paired-service rule
- Manfred — Consumables footprint, Paired-service rule
- Composite sheet — Paired-service rule
- Grusson deposit — Benjamin Grusson
- Route document — Route document
- Léonie Fasquel — Deposit 14
- In defence of cumulative transposition — Route document
- Journey time survey — Nebula