The International Exhibition of 1862

Weighing in at just under a stone, the four-volume catalogue of the industrial products shown at the 1862 international exhibition can scarcely be described as user-friendly. Published to coincide with the great event, it is hard to imagine anyone lugging this brute of a book round the nearly 1,000 square feet of the exhibition building. Nor, it must be said, is the organisation of the various volumes all that helpful for the idle reader. A typical page comes at the very end, with Venezuela, which exhibited a little over a hundred items in the North-West court. The catalogue records that these ranged from ‘The arms of Venezuela, in feathers of the natural colours’ to ‘a table of various woods’; from ‘Cotton wicks’ to ‘Coffee’. None is illustrated, nor (apart from the name of the manufacturer) is any further information divulged. There is no index—or, rather, there are multiple indexes and a variety of different Contents pages; but no single source by which to navigate more than 1,000 pages and several hundred thousand entries

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