The room
is the exhibit.

From steel to glass

An enamel sign starts as a sheet of steel. The plate is cut to shape, cleaned and coated with a ground layer of finely powdered glass, then fired in a kiln at roughly 800 degrees Celsius until the powder melts into a smooth skin.

One colour at a time

Each colour is a separate step: the design is laid on through stencils or screens, one colour at a time, and the plate goes back into the kiln after every layer, so a sign with five colours may be fired six or seven times. Because the colour is glass fused to metal, it does not fade in sunlight and rain runs off it; the usual damage is a chip at the edge where the steel shows through and rusts.

The Hungarian trade

Hungary had a strong enamel industry in the twentieth century, with works such as the one in Bonyhád known well beyond the country, and enamelled steel was used for cooking pots, house numbers, street plates and advertising alike. Signs like these hung outside shops and inside bars for decades, which is why so many survive with their colours intact.

Dayton, Ohio, 1879

The mechanical cash register was invented in 1879 by James Ritty, a saloon owner in Dayton, Ohio, who wanted a machine that recorded every sale so the takings could be checked against the drawer at closing time. The company that grew from his patent, National Cash Register, sold the idea to shops and bars across the world.

Entirely mechanical

The workings are entirely mechanical. Pressing the keys sets the amount; pulling the crank or lever turns a set of numbered wheels that add it to the running total, pops indicator tabs up into a window so the customer can see the price, prints a line on the paper roll and springs the cash drawer open. The bell rang at the same moment, which is why a sale still "rings up".

Built for decades

Registers like this were heavy, often cast in decorated brass or finished in painted steel, and were built for decades of daily use. Their sound, a clatter of keys and a bell, belongs to the memory of every shop and presszó of the period.

The mounts

An archive photo corner does two jobs. The mounts themselves, the small triangular pockets fixed to the wall or the album page, hold a print by its corners without any adhesive touching the photograph, so an old print can be shown and later removed unharmed; albums and archives have mounted photographs this way for a century.

Looking slowly

The corner as a place is for looking slowly. Street photographs from mid-century Budapest reward that. The cars are Pobedas, the Soviet-built saloon of the late 1940s and 1950s; the bicycles are Csepels, made at the works on Csepel island; men wear hats, shopfronts carry painted lettering, and the pavements are wider than the parked cars would allow today.

The same facades

Nádor utca runs through Lipótváros, the inner-city district behind the Danube bank, and much of its building line dates from the nineteenth century, which is why the same facades can be found in a photograph and outside the door. The game of an archive corner is comparison: hold the picture in mind, step outside, and see what the same view looks like now.