The register
Every entry in the publication, by section. Twenty-two in total.
This is the complete list. The front page carries an edit of it.
| Entry | What it covers |
|---|---|
| The Mystic Lamb | A polyptych in Ghent that has been stolen, split, hidden, faked and cleaned, and is now read partly through the panel that is still missing. What the object is, what happened to it, and what the recent cleaning changed about how it looks. |
| Panel and canvas | Painting on wood and painting on cloth age in opposite directions. What each does over centuries and why it decides how a work can be moved. |
| The treasury | Reliquaries, plate and metalwork kept together because of what they are made of rather than what they depict. |
| What a collection is missing | Holdings are shaped by what was bought, looted, refused and thrown out. The gaps are as informative as the walls. |
| Entry | What it covers |
|---|---|
| The adapted building | A mill becomes a gallery, a power station a hall. The decisions all sit at the join: whether new work announces itself, and whether it could be taken out again. |
| Legible as new | The conservation principle that repairs should be readable as repairs rather than faked to match — and the buildings where it was ignored. |
| The roof first | Almost every ruin is a roof failure that was left. Why the sequence of repair is always roof, then water, then everything else. |
| Services in old walls | Heating, wiring and lighting in a building whose walls cannot be chased. |
| Entry | What it covers |
|---|---|
| The trades that survived | Stone carving, lime plastering, stained glass, thatch, bell founding. They persist where there is enough repair work to keep somebody employed year-round. |
| Lime, not cement | Old walls move and breathe; cement does neither. The single most common way a well-meant repair destroys the thing it was meant to save. |
| Apprentice to master | How a trade with no textbook is transmitted, and what is lost when the chain breaks for a generation. |
| Tools that outlive trades | Workshop tools survive in collections long after nobody can say what they were for. |
| Entry | What it covers |
|---|---|
| The procession | A route walked on the same day each year, the objects carried, and the fact that the route usually predates the reason given for it. |
| Costume as archive | Garments remade to the same pattern for generations, and what the remaking preserves. |
| The calendar | Why so much heritage is fixed to a date, and what happens to a custom when the date stops meaning anything. |
| Entry | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Conservation is maintenance | Not rescue but routine: monitoring, cleaning, environment, and doing as little as will do. The dramatic intervention is usually the failure case. |
| Reversibility | The rule that anything done to an object should be undoable by whoever comes next. |
| Light, damp and pests | The three things that actually destroy collections, in order of how much they cost. |
| The store, not the gallery | Most of any collection is in a store room. What that room has to do. |
| Entry | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Who owns a monument | State, church, commune, trust or private family — the answer differs by country and decides everything about what may be done to a building. |
| Listing and its limits | Protection registers exist nearly everywhere and mean something different in each. |
| Restore or arrest | Some traditions rebuild what was lost; others stabilise the ruin and stop. Both are defensible and they produce completely different countries. |