Pumpkinhead Bears, Dragons and Dracula – Oh My!

The Edwin and Terry Murray Collection of miniatures, aka The Most Fun Project In The Lab Ever, came in recently for enclosures. These lead figurines come from various role-playing games including Dungeons and Dragons. Over on Devil’s Tale you can read more about the processing of this collection.

The miniatures arrived in a variety of boxes as if the boys and girls had just finished playing with them. Opening the boxes felt like Christmas morning, I couldn’t wait to see what was inside. I think everyone in the lab got tired of me saying “Look at this one!” every five minutes but I couldn’t help it.

The figurines range in size from less than an inch to ten or more inches. You would think that these would be fairly robust being metal, but lead is soft and a lot of them are very fragile. Many have been painted and we know for sure some were painted by the Murray brothers themselves.

The figurines needed protection from rubbing against each other and plenty of cushioning to keep them from jostling around. They are also very heavy as a collection, so they needed to be boxed in a way that they could be lifted without throwing out your back.

My strategy was to wrap each in tissue and place them in modular artifact boxes. Each tray has twelve compartments, and each compartment holds on average four to six figurines depending on their size. The very large figurines were put into custom-built trays. I did my best to keep like-themed characters together so people interested in animals or dragons or warriors should be able to find what they are looking for. Admittedly, users may find this system cumbersome but if these start receiving very high use, I can revisit my boxing decision in consultation with Research Services.

There are many, many pictures on our Flickr site that shows more of the boxing process and some of my favorite characters including the above mentioned Pumpkinhead Bear and many, many dragons (my favorite creatures of all). Be sure to check out the skeletal dragon, she has amazing detail and is so very fragile. She also has a broken wing but it is there with her in her box.

I’m a little sad to see these leave the lab because it was so much fun to work on. But I know that they are now well protected and will be there for anyone to use in the future, maybe even me.