Imago Mundi MS 12-24

Life and career

Raleigh Ashlin Skelton (1906-70), always known as Peter, joined the Printed Books department of the British Museum in 1931. He returned to the Museum in 1946 after war service, and in 1950 succeeded Dr Edward Lynam as Superintendent of the Map Room. Between then and his retirement in 1967 he built up the holdings and reputation of the Map Room as a major resort for historians and geographers. He was also a considerable published scholar in his own right.

Imago Mundi XXV was a Skelton Memorial Volume, with an introduction and appreciation of Skelton by Koeman and by DB Quinn. An obituary by Helen Wallis in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 58 (1973), pages 139-48, includes a bibliography.

Work for Imago Mundi

Skelton had assisted Bagrow as an English 'Corresponding Editor' since 1949. After Bagrow's death in 1957, at a time of great uncertainty about the future of Imago Mundi, he assisted Bagrow's chosen successor, Edzer Roukema, a retired Dutch merchant navy captain. Between them they kept the journal alive. Roukema was 'Secretary-Editor'. His role was to liaise with contributors and publishers. Skelton was 'Consultant Editor', i.e. quality controller (including reader of typescripts and proofs). This continued the role he had performed while Bagrow was alive, but now he also provided academic judgment and background knowledge.

Bagrow had delivered the copy for Imago Mundi XIV to the printers/publishers, Mouton & Co, two weeks before his death, and had intended this issue to comprise around 200 pages. Skelton and Roukema published it in May 1959. However Mouton & Co, for financial reasons, limited the issue to 128 pages. This was because the subsidy to Bagrow from the Humanistiska Fonden of Stockholm had ceased upon his death.

Various scripts were therefore held over until volume XV, so that all of Imago Mundi XIV, and most of XV, consisted of material edited by Bagrow, not Roukema or Skelton.

On Roukema's sudden death on 12 April 1960, Skelton showed great energy and initiative. He acquired the rights to Imago Mundi from Bagrow's widow. He also established the journal on a new footing as the publication of a new non-profitmaking limited company, Imago Mundi Limited, with a new Executive Editor, Cor Koeman, based in The Hague. Skelton himself remained 'Editor-in-Chief', or sometimes 'General Editor'. Interim finance (a grant for three years) was obtained from the Gulbenkian Foundation.

Imago Mundi XV had been in the press when Roukema died unexpectedly. He had also passed the copy for XVI to Mouton & Co shortly before. Imago Mundi XV finally appeared in March 1961. Volumes XVI ('1962') to XXIV (1970) were subsequently published by Skelton and Koeman in May 1963 and after. For these they used a new printer/publisher, Nico Israel of Amsterdam.

Skelton retired from the Map Room in March/April 1967, at the height of his powers, though his Imago Mundi correspondence is noticeably thinner after 1966. He died unexpectedly in Dec 1970 following a car accident.

Skelton's Imago Mundi papers

Skelton's Imago Mundi papers were given to Imago Mundi Limited in 1971, after his death. They were then deposited in the British Library Map Room by Eila Campbell in 1978. Skelton's library of printed books, and most of his other papers about a multitude of scholarly projects, were sold by his family in 1971 to the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

A few Imago Mundi items appear to have been sent to Newfoundland by mistake. (See the Memorial University catalogue of Skelton's papers, by Alberta Auringer Wood, 1989. Several copies are held by the British Library; it is also on-line.) Conversely, Skelton's Imago Mundi papers contain a few items which probably should be in Newfoundland. These have been brought together in the present catalogue as MS 24.

Skelton's filing was poor, no more than a few current papers clipped together. There was no overall system. The present arrangement is therefore entirely new. Most of the papers are now in straight chronological order. This allows the reader easily to become immersed in the business of Imago Mundi at any given date. A subject arrangement would have been difficult, for Skelton rarely confined a letter to a single topic.

Skelton's papers contain hardly any scripts or proofs. He did not consider these worth keeping. (See his advice to Olga Bagrow dated 11 June 1959, in MS 14.)

Skelton's younger daughter, Mrs Alexa Barrow, started in 1970-1 to sort her father's Imago Mundi papers into subject files, such as 'Editing', or 'Management', using new file covers bought for the purpose. However she made little progress. Her arrangement was dismantled during cataloguing in 2008-10. The new file covers were discarded.

A separate attempt at some stage to merge into one sequence all the papers for the late 1940s and 1950s of Bagrow, Skelton and Eila Campbell has also been dismantled.