This notebook from 1946 demonstrates Baines’s method of research in the early post-war years, at the time of the establishment of the Galpin Society. Baines took comprehensive notes from the catalogues of other museums as well as from historical inventories, listing the instruments held, noting the differences between types, and drawing details that interested him. His drawings here show the reeds of shawms in the collection of the Museum of the Conservatoire Royal in Brussels.
This research provided Baines with a thorough grounding in collections-based organology, a depth of background knowledge that must have proved useful a decade later when he came to write Woodwind Instruments and their History, published in 1957.
