Reading the newsletter run

We have had The Bench on the site as scans since 2003, but without transcripts they were effectively invisible. I have spent eight months typing them up.

Things I learned: we once owned a horse. The 1987 supplier list includes a bindery called Sorrel & Daughters, run by a woman named Edith Sorrel, whose daughter worked here on the bench. Every issue carries a box of house abbreviations, which I assume existed because the conservators wrote everything in a compressed shorthand nobody else could read.

The scans have no OCR. They were made in 2003 by a bureau who charged by the page and we did not pay for it.