With the help of a grant from the South Eastern Museums Service, a leading London globe restorer has recently been commissioned to visit the Museum and undertake a complete survey of the condition of the globes in the collection. Having been asked in rather a vague way to look at what might have been a dozen or so objects to be included in the survey, Sylvia Sumira eventually found that it was long past closing time before she had reached the twenty-third globe of the day, with a number still remaining to be examined.
Among the globes surveyed so far are examples by the makers John Senex, the Bardin family, John and William Cary, and Dudley Adams. But the collection is not just confined to traditional terrestrial and celestial globes. The Museum has a rare example of John Russell’s ‘Selenographia’ of 1797 – a printed globe of the moon mounted in a mechanism for demonstrating the effect of lunar libration – and a Russian moon globe of 1961 that includes lunar features invisible from earth photographed by the space station Lunik III in 1959.