Most objects were stored straightforwardly by type and material: “sea-shells”, “Tin Foil”, “Balls/Cork”, “marbles old fashioned”, “stamps (non-official)”, while stocks of prefabricated elements such as “Owl Cutouts” offered ready options.

The categories of Cornell’s numerous manila folders of printed matter range from clear iconographic subjects such as “Castles” or themes such as “Astronomy” to people, including diverse images Cornell associated with their personas. This one is stuffed full of Cornell’s stamps.

Other boxes with evocative labels such as “Nostalgia of the Sea” and “L’Humeur Vagabonde” contain the seeds of ideas in the form of grouped objects. This one is “Winged Insects Butterfly”.

Likewise, folders with conceptual groupings reveal evolving subjective sets that share an identity in Cornell’s mind: “Celestial Theater”, “Museum without Walls”, “Childhood Regained”, “Center of a Labyrinth”. Cornell termed these dossiers “explorations” and described the building of files as “imaginative pictorial research akin to the image-making of poetry”; some grew to constitute artworks in themselves.

Cornell thought of these working materials as “sketchboxes” that performed a function comparable to preparatory drawings and studies. He enthused over “the prospect of cluttered cellar – / creative filing / creative arranging / as poetics / as technique / as joyous creation.”

Sorting or locating images, or finding homes for the day’s gleanings in the mild chaos of the shelves augmented the chance connections that Cornell craved. It was these that led him to create his celebrated glass-fronted shadow boxes – each standing as a window into the powerful wanderlust of an inexhaustibly curious mind.