From Don Covington

circus-war_jpg, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. LONDON. Questionable business practices, smear campaigns and a two-headed woman: not a typical day at the office for conservators at the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts. The director of the centre’s paper laboratory, Walter Newman, and his team were presented with a series of 19th-century boards from a house in northern Vermont. The removal of exterior siding during a 1991 home renovation revealed several 1883 posters advertising the Adam Forepaugh travelling circus. Soon after their discovery, the wooden boards were donated to nearby Shelburne Museum where they remained in storage until a recent $35,000 donation enabled their treatment. “It was immediately tantalising because we could see bits of posters protruding from the edges of the top layer of posters,” said Newman. After spraying the posters with a fixative, an immersion in a water bath allowed conservator Bucky Weaver to begin separating the layers. To the delight of conservators and Shelburne curator Kory Rogers, a second set of posters from a rival company—the John B Doris Menagerie and Circus—were found underneath. “This is an example of a circus poster war,” said Rogers, adding: “When competing circuses had overlapping travelling routes a ‘skirmish brigade’—an underhanded band of mobile advertising agents—would plaster over competitors posters.” There was already bad blood between the two circuses stemming from an earlier incident when Forepaugh, whom Rogers described as a “rather underhanded character”, posted a rat sheet claiming that Doris advocated the assassination of President William McKinley. Forepaugh also publicly denounced one of Doris’s acts, “Millie-Christine”—conjoined twins which were billed as a ”Two-Headed Lady”—as a horrible monstrosity that frightened children. Millie-Christine sued Forepaugh for slander.