Behind many a stuffed animal lurks a
thrilling story of travel and adventure.
—WILLIAM HORNADAY, 1896
***
The history of taxidermy, natural history, habitat dioramas, and museums is central to Karen Wonders's amazingly comprehensive study "Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History" (Ph.D. diss., Uppsala University, 1993); Stephen Christopher Quinn's Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History (Abrams, in association with the American Museum of Natural History, 2006), which also contains beautiful photographs; and Stephen T. Asma's Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford University Press, 2001). Asma explains with considerable delight why people have always been drawn to the macabre and the strange, and nothing is quite as macabre and strange as a museum of natural history.
An immensely fascinating book about the natural history mania that swept the United Kingdom from 1820 to 1870 is Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History (Doubleday, 1980). This profoundly affecting book about natural history in the pre- and post-Darwin eras provided a rich context essential to my understanding of the world in which the taxidermists I wrote about lived and worked. For an understanding of how the trade was practiced in the nineteenth century, I relied on popular turn-of-the-century taxidermy manuals and on Christopher Frost's self-published A History of British Taxidermy (1987), which describes the era from 1820 to 1910, when Britain was the center of the taxidermic universe, having taken over the role from France and not yet relinquished it to the United States. Pat Morris's splendid article "An Historical Review of Bird Taxidermy in Britain" (Archives of Natural History, 1993) chronicles taxidermy's early development. An Annotated Bibliography on Preparation, Taxidermy, and Collection Management of Vertebrates with Emphasis on Birds by Stephen P. Rogers, Mary Ann Schmidt, and Thomas Gütebier (Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 1989), called the "blue book" for short, is a trove of facts and sources.
For information about specific bird species, I used the Sibley Guide to Birds by David Allen Sibley (Knopf, 2000). For mammalian taxonomy and phylogeny, I relied on the Princeton Field Guides book Mammals of North America by Roland W. Kays and Don E. Wilson (Princeton University Press, 2002) and numerous Web sites, including the National Museum of Natural History's Mammal Species of the World Database, www.nmnhgoph.si.edu/msw. Also see the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Red List of Threatened Animals, www.iucnredlist.org.
Taxidermy is an obscure topic for which no central archive or comprehensive book exists. If it weren't for the taxidermists themselves—who love to preserve things—countless old manuals, scrapbooks, memoirs, and catalogs would have perished. Thankfully, several taxidermists and taxidermy collectors generously lent me sources from their impressive personal libraries. Additionally, I spent weeks at the AMNH archives and the Explorers Club library in Manhattan.
The idea for this book grew out of an article I wrote for the New York Times, "When a Polar Bear Needs a Pedicure," which ran on March 26, 2002. For that piece, the AMNH's exceptionally knowledgeable senior project manager, Stephen C. Quinn ("Mr. Diorama"), gave me a private tour of every diorama and display in the museum bearing the mark of David Schwendeman.
Anyone who has had the distinct pleasure of hanging around Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio for fifteen years (or fifty years) will get to meet every living Schwendeman, every Milltown neighbor and friend, every fellow birder and curiosity seeker who loves to poke around in such anachronistic shops of wonders. In addition to many enjoyable talks with David and Bruce Schwendeman and their extended family and friends, Rose Wadsworth (the AMNH's former exhibition coordinator for living invertebrates) wrote me two anecdote-filled letters and sent me an assortment of photographs, memos, relevant book chapters, and news clips. Further sources include the following articles: "Memories and Lessons from a House of Nature," Home News, March 23, 1986; "Taxidermy—All in the Family," New York Times, October 23, 1977; and the AMNH's employee newsletter, Grapevine (May/June 1983 and January/February 1987).
William Hornaday's quote is from his popular manual Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891; I used the 1916 edition). This book was used as the basis of Elwood's popular correspondence course, established in 1904 and undertaken by several living taxidermists quoted in this book.
Information on Ker & Downey is from Ker & Downey Safaris: The Inside Story by Jan Hemsing (Sealpoint Publicity, 1989).
It is still possible to see Misty at the Beebe Ranch in Chincoteague, Virginia. Trigger is on display at the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Missouri, as is Dale Evans's horse Buttermilk and Roy Rogers's stuffed German shepherd Bullet.
Charles Darwin's foray into taxidermy is discussed in Stephen Asma's Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads.
A New York Times article on rebuilding Deyrolle ran on November 15, 2008.
My source on contemporary antifur campaigns was Andrew Bolton's Wild: Fashion Untamed (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004).
The New York Times obituary for Douglas Herrick ran on January 19, 2003.
The Third Annual Report of the Society of American Taxidermists (Gibson Brothers, 1884) contains a bibliography of taxidermy, in which the obscure methods used in the 1700s are described. Additional methods can be found in Amandine Péquignot's "The History of Taxidermy: Clues for Preservation (Collections: A Journal for Museum Archives Professionals, February 2006) and An Annotated Bibliography on Preparation, Taxidermy, and Collection Management of Vertebrates with Emphasis on Birds by Stephen P. Rogers, Mary Ann Schmidt, and Thomas Gütebier, which does a great job of defining the role of the museum taxidermist.
I found Peale's correspondence with Washington in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology guide About the Exhibits (1964, 1985).
The story of Bécoeur is expertly told by L. C. Rookmaaker, P. Morris, I. E. Glenn, and P. J. Mundy in "The Ornithological Cabinet of Jean-Baptiste Bécoeur and the Secret of Arsenical Soap" ( Archives of Natural History, 2006).
William Hornaday's quote about jealous, narrow-minded taxidermists ran in Science on July 24, 1880.
John James Audubon's effort to animate bird skins with wires is from Audubon and His Journals, vol. 2 (Dover Publications, 1986).
Pat Morris's article on arsenic exposure and the life spans of Victorian taxidermists, "Stuffing for Longevity," was published in New Scientist in August 1982.
Stephen Quinn's Windows on Nature has wonderful mini-biographies of the AMNH'S diorama artists; this is where I read about James Perry Wilson and the first renovation of the Hall of Ocean Life. The rest is from David and Bruce Schwendeman and AMNH press releases.
Facts about the Biology of Birds renovation came from AMNH's employee newsletter, Grapevine (May/June 1983).
Retired Milwaukee Public Museum taxidermist Floyd Easterman generously shared documents from his personal archive with me, including the SAT annual reports of 1881, 1882, and 1884 and William Hornaday's personal scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Mary Anne Andrei's fastidiously researched article "Breathing Life into Stuffed Animals: The Society of American Taxidermists, 1880–1885" (Collections: A Journal for Museum Archives Professionals, November 2004) was extremely illuminating, as was an interview I had with her by phone.
America's approach to taxidermy is described in Karen Wonders's Habitat Dioramas. This is where I learned about the tradition of American sportsmen such as Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club.
For panda information and information on Hsing-Hsing, see "China's Panda Ambassadors," http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4508873.stm; "Animal Info—Information on Endangered Mammals," http://animalinfo.org/; and the National Zoo's Web site, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/GiantPandas/default.cfm.
No one can describe A Fight in the Tree-Tops with more animation and wit than its creator, William Hornaday. I found his lively words in his memoir A Wild-Animal Round-up: Stories and Pictures from the Passing Show (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925) and in Andrei's article "Breathing Life into Stuffed Animals." Wonders's Habitat Dioramas, from which I got Hornaday's quote "I love nature..." from Two Years in the Jungle (1885), provided the context in which I could view Tree-Tops in its era.
William Hornaday's account of Ward's Natural Science Establishment, "The King of Museum-Builders" (Commercial Travelers Home Magazine, February 1896), is incredibly vivid. Likewise, Natural History's March-April 1927 issue has articles by famous Ward's grads such as Frederic A. Lucas and William Wheeler, who lovingly describe the place. The Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology guide About the Exhibits (1964, 1985) also has a section on Professor Henry Ward and his magnificent quarry.
Sources on Carl Akeley, his African expeditions, and his taxidermy process come from many places, including primarily the AMNH archives (his personal papers, journal, telegrams, correspondence, press bulletins, and records, as well as those of his widow, Mary Jobe Akeley) and to a lesser extent the Explorers Club library in Manhattan. I also relied on the following works: Akeley's memoir In Brightest Africa (Doubleday, 1920; I used the 1923 edition); Carl Akeley's Africa, an account of the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition by Mary Jobe Akeley (Blue Ribbon Books, 1929; I used the 1932 edition); The Wilderness Lives Again by Mary Jobe Akeley (Dodd, Mead, 1940), which describes his step-by-step preservation process. Roy Chapman Andrews's essay "Akeley of Africa" (True, June 1952) provided thoughtful insight into the character of this complex man, as did Robert Rockwell's memoir My Way of Becoming a Hunter (Norton, 1855). Stephen Quinn's Windows on Nature contains images from the AMNH's archives and behind-the-scenes information on the making of African Hall. The May 1914 issue of the American Museum Journal (14, no. 5) is about Akeley, as are the essays "The Autobiography of a Taxidermist" ( Natural History, March-April 1927) and "Carl Akeley's Enduring Dream" by George R. Price (Reader's Digest, September 1959). The March-April 1927 issue of Natural History is devoted entirely to Akeley's legacy and contains glowing commemorative essays by his dearest friends and colleagues: Kermit Roosevelt, Baron de Carter de Marchienne, F. Trubbee Davison, George Sheerwood, Frederic Lucas, William Wheeler, and Henry Fairfield Osborn.
Of all the Akeley books and articles, none is as passionately researched and rendered as African Obsession: The Life and Legacy of Carl Akeley by Penelope Bodry-Sanders (Batax Museum Publishing, 1998). I relied on this book for specific details about his early life and career, his time at Ward's, and his Congo expeditions.
I attended the June 2004 elephant radiography press conference at the museum, where I interviewed the conservation team while they shot images of the elephants. The New York Times ran a piece on the elephant project on June 4, 2004.
The Roosevelt-Smithsonian expedition of 1909 is described in Karen Wonders's "Habitat Dioramas."
The alleged elephant substitution is from Bodry-Sanders's African Obsession.
I found descriptions of Ward's Natural Science Establishment in the aforementioned memoirs and books; in Hornaday's profile of Ward, "The King of Museum-Builders"; in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology guide About the Exhibits (1964, 1985); and in Robert Rockwell's memoir My Way of Becoming a Hunter.
"Zoological Collections in the Early British Museum—Documentation of the Collection" by Alwyne Wheeler ( Archives of Natural History, 1996) summarizes the British Museum's collections, sources, and importance. The origins and contents of famous AMNH collections (those of Prince Maximilian of Wied, P. T. Barnum, and Roy Chapman Andrews) are from two old AMNH guidebooks (1953, 1972) and from the New York Times obituary of paleontologist James Hall (August 9, 1894).
The Thomas Barbour expedition is from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology guide About the Exhibits (1964, 1985).
Peale's information is drawn from many sources, chiefly Charles Coleman Sellers's Mr. Peale's Museum (Norton, 1980) and from Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History.
The account of Roy Chapman Andrews's expedition is from Science Explorer: Roy Chapman Andrews by Jules Archer (Simon & Schuster, 1968).
Charles Waterton's quote is from the 1889 edition of his expedition memoir Wanderings in South America (Macmillan).
Taxidermists originally portrayed the dodo as looking like it had swallowed a Gouda cheese and the goblin shark as having a shovellike protuberance on its forehead. The fat dodo theory was debunked in Andrew C. Kitchener's study "On the External Appearance of the Dodo, Raphus cucullatus" ( Archives of Natural History, 1993). An anatomically accurate rendering of the goblin shark can be seen in Sharks and Rays of Australia by P. R. Last and J. D. Stevens (Fisheries Research and Development, 1994). A goblin shark with a shovel-like protuberance is depicted in The World Encyclopedia of Fishes by Alwyne Wheeler (MacDonald, 1985).
Additional information on Akeley's first expedition to the Congo to collect gorillas is primarily from his article "Gorillas—Real and Mythical" (Natural History, September-October 1923). I also used documents from the AMNH archives, including Mary Jobe Akeley's personal correspondence and an essay by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn.
The New Yorker published a delightful review of African Hall called "Africa Brought to Town" on May 2, 1936. David Schwendeman's vivid memories brought the ribbon cutting alive.
Frederic A. Lucas's quote about what to call the modern taxidermist is from Natural History, March-April 1927.
In addition to many thoughtful conversations with John Matthews, Paul Rhymer, and Ken Walker, I interviewed National Museum of Natural History collections manager Linda K. Gordon, curator in charge James G. Mead, and conservator Catharine Hawks, as well as conservation scientist Amandine Péquignot, Centre de recherches sur la conservation collections at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, and Frank Greenwell, Smithsonian taxidermist from 1957 to 1999. The Smithsonian's mammal hall press conference, where museum scientists and administrators spoke and then led reporters on guided tours of the new hall, took place in November 2003. I was on Associate Director for Public Programs Robert Sullivan's tour. The Smithsonian's Office of Public Affairs provided statistics and facts about the old West Wing and the new Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals, as did the November 2003 issue of Smithsonian.
British Natural History Museum fish curator Oliver Crimmen ("We're just a bunch of state-funded Tony Perkinses") took me on two fascinating behind-the-scenes tours of the museum. At Wandsworth, the museum's gigantic off-site storage facility, we came upon a donkey that looked as if it had laughed so hard it burst its seams, and we began to talk about why people humanize mammals. Crimmen said, "It will be a sad day when I stop anthropomorphizing." Only now do I realize how deeply his words influenced how I approached this book.
The New York Times reported Lawrence M. Small's resignation in "Report Faults Oversight by Smithsonian Regents" on June 19, 2007. "History for Sale" (Washington Post, January 20, 2002) chronicles Small's efforts to privatize the Smithsonian through big-time donors; I relied on this for figures and context, including the protest memo signed by curators at the National Museum of American History and also for information about Kenneth H. Behring. The Archaeological Institute of America ran an online feature on Small and Behring called "Crisis at the Smithsonian," www.archaeology.org/online/features/smithsonian/behring.html, September 19, 2002.
For accounts of how Behring tried to import the trophy remains of the argali sheep, see "Controversy Surrounds Rare Sheep in Canada" (CBC Radio Transcripts, http://archives.foodsafetynetwork.ca/ animalnet/2001/8-2001/an-08-19-01-01.txt, August 17, 2001). The Humane Society's online feature is called "Trophy Hunting," www.hsus.org/wildlife/hunting_old/trophy_hunting/, n.d. "How to Bag Your Own Endangered Species" by Linda Gottwald ran in USA Today on February 3, 2000. Also see the Safari Club International's Online Record Book, www.scirecordbook.org/login/index.cfm.
A New York Times feature titled "Friends Matter for Reclusive Creature of African Forest" (October 12, 2004) describes how scientists based in the Congo continue to study the okapi.
William Hornaday's quote is from the 1916 edition of Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting.
Though separated by ninety-three years, Ken Walker's nine-month appointment at the Smithsonian echoed that of his hero, Robert Rockwell, who worked there for nine months in 1910. I drew information about Rockwell's time at the Smithsonian from his autobiography My Way of Becoming a Hunter.
Of all the brief accounts of James Smithson's bequest, my favorite is in Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History. For a history of the Smithsonian Institution, see http://siarchives.si.edu/history/main_generalhistory.html.
After the mammal hall opening, several newspapers and news services reviewed it, including the Washington Post, Winston-Salem Journal, Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dallas Morning News, Austin American-Statesman, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Scripps Howard News Service, and Associated Press. Of them, the Architectural Record's piece (November 1, 2004) was especially helpful in describing the high-tech wizardry designers used to create the hall's special effects and sound-and-light shows. Paul Rhymer's personal account appears in Taxidermy Today (August 2004). The Smithsonian's Office of Public Affairs' press materials provided further details about the massive renovation of the West Wing and its prior usage.
Sally Love's take on dioramas ran in the Baltimore Sun on November 28, 2003.
I read about the Fenykovi elephant's anus (and the giraffe's clay privates, mentioned earlier in the chapter) in the Baltimore Sun (November 28, 2003).
I learned about how the Natural History Museum evacuated specimens during World War II in William T. Stearn's book The Natural History Museum at South Kensington (Heinemann, 1981).
This chapter was drawn primarily from interviews with Emily Mayer and her family, friends, and colleagues. The Times of London's "Stuff Art: This Is a Life and Death Thing" (August 16, 2000) and Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal (Reaktion Books, 2000) provided further insight into Mayer's career. For Mayer's take on her own artwork, I relied on her artist's statements in the catalogs for two of her solo shows, "Out of Context" (Campden Gallery, Gloucestershire, England, 2007) and "Material Evidence" (Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, Ireland, 1995). Mayer's master's thesis, "Representing Animality: The Nature of the Representation of Animals in Contemporary Taxidermy and Contemporary Sculpture" (Norwich School of Art and Design, 1990), demonstrates the deeply complex relationship Mayer has with animals, in art and in life.
I read about Damien Hirst in his books I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (Booth-Clibborn, 1997; I used the 2005 edition) and On the Way to Work, a series of interviews with Hirst by the British writer Gordon Burn (Universe, 2002; I used the 2007 edition).
Erosion molding is described in A Guide to Model Making and Taxidermy by Leo J. Cappel (A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1973).
Emily Mayer and John Loker let me keep their copy of Dipped in Vitriol by Nicholas Parsons (Pan Books, 1981).
Pets, Usual and Unusual by Maxwell Knight was originally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. I used the 1962 edition.
Irmelin Mayer and I stayed up very late one night talking about Emily's childhood and flipping through family scrapbooks. The next day, she generously let me photocopy all the articles about Emily. The titles alone bear mentioning: "Girl Taxidermist Loves Job"; "OK, Where Does a Taxidermist Pick Up a Dead Camel?"; "Emily Can Ferret Out a Bargain!"; "She Keeps Bodies: Unusual Job for Emily, 19"; "Tinker, Tailor, Taxidermist"; "Chipping In with the Fish"; "Illustrious Corpses"; "Get Stuffed! If You'll Pardon the Expression"; "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of"; "Dead Clever; Change of Course as Emily Tackles Sculpture"; "Life After Death."
Emily and Irmelin Mayer graciously provided me with sources on Lotte Pritzel. These include Lotte Pritzel: Puppen des Lasters des Grauens und der Ekstase (Puppentheatermuseum, 1987); Hans Bellmer, a biography of the controversial surrealist by Peter Webb (Quartet Books, 1985); "'They've Got Souls of White Cotton, the Little Darlings!': Lotte Pritzel and Her Wax Figurines," an unpublished scholarly work by Barbara Borek; and "Fragments," Irmelin Mayer's unpublished autobiographical work about growing up in Nazi-era Berlin.
The quote comparing a Hirst show to Jack the Ripper perpetrating a crime is from Richard Shone's essay "Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away" in the catalog for the show (Serpentine Gallery, London, 1994).
For a deeper understanding of how England and America differed in their approaches to natural history and specimen collecting, see Joyce Chaplin's article "Nature and Nation: Natural History in Context," in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730—1860, edited by Sue Ann Prince (American Philosophical Society, 2003).
I read about how Lionel Walter Rothschild liked to outbid the British Museum in The Heyday of Natural History by Lynn Barber. "My Museum: The Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, Tring" by Tring's bird skins preparator Katrina Cook appeared in the 2006 issue of Taxidermist; it describes the history of the museum and what it contains today. The anecdote about how the baron was blackmailed into selling off his peerless bird collection is from Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston (St. Martin's Press, 1986).
For information about the Powell-Cotton Museum, see "Quex House and the Powell-Cotton Museum" by Richard Crowhurst, www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/museums/quex.shtml, 2006. Also see the Powell-Cotton Museum Web site, www.quexmuseum.org.
Charles Waterton may have been exasperating, but he was never boring. This made writing about him painful, because I had to omit how he used to crawl under a table and bark like a dog, along with just about everything he ever said or wrote. The surviving Waterton quotes and quirks are chiefly drawn from his somewhat reliable expedition memoir Wanderings in South America. I used the 1889 edition, which includes an endearing biography of the squire (complete with drawings of Walton Hall's pigpens, breeding tower, and lofty trees) by the Reverend J. G. Wood, as well as an explanatory essay on his taxidermy methods. I found his quote about possessing "Promethean boldness" and his use of Horace's "By laboring to be brief you become obscure" in an essay by Dr. J. B. Holder in the SAT's 1884 annual report; they are also in Wanderings.
For the account of the Nondescript, I used Wanderings. Author Errol Fuller e-mailed his own very endearing description, and Lynn Barber describes this "taxidermic frolic" in The Heyday of Natural History.
The Watertonian terms "pseudo-classical phraseology" and "complimentary nomenclature" are from the biography by Wood in Wanderings. "You must possess Promethean boldness..." and "A hideous spectacle of death in ragged plumage" are from Wanderings.
Montagu Browne calls Waterton an "eccentric genius" and "pioneer" and also describes his methods for making peacock faces and scraping out ape feet in his two manuals: Practical Taxidermy: Manual of Instruction to the Amateur in Collecting, Preserving, and Setting Up Natural History Specimens of All Kinds, 2nd ed. (L. Upcott Gill, 1884), and Artistic and Scientific Taxidermy and Modelling (Adam and Charles Black, 1896).
"Chairbitch is OK too" is from "View from the Chair," Emily Mayer's inaugural letter as chair to the guild journal, Taxidermist (2002).
Kim McDonald's article "E-bay—You Are Being Watched! Internet Auctions and the Natural History Specimen" ran in Taxidermist in 2006. The Get Stuffed scandal has been widely publicized in the United Kingdom. The Independent ran a story on it at the time on February 2, 2000, and the Guardian covered it retrospectively on August 8, 2008. The Birmingham Evening Mail reported that the Metropolitan Police Wildlife Crime Unit seized more than twenty thousand endangered species in 2000.
The history of the Guild of Taxidermists is from Emily Mayer's graduate thesis, "Representing Animality," and Christopher Frost's A History of British Taxidermy.
Information about Rowland Ward and his illustrious wildlife studio primarily came from Pat Morris's self-published monograph Rowland Ward: Taxidermist to the World (2003), which also has amazing photos. Front and Wonders ("Habitat Dioramas") also cover Ward.
"The Antiquity of the Duchess of Richmond's Parrot," Pat Morris's account of how he x-rayed the duchess's stuffed African grey parrot, appeared in Museums Journal 81, no. 3 (1981). I went to Westminster Abbey to see the parrot in 2003.
Daphne du Maurier was inspired to write Jamaica Inn after an ill-fated outing on Bodmin Moor. The story goes like this: One day she was staying at the Jamaica Inn and went out riding in the moor with a friend. A storm broke, and they were forced to seek shelter in an abandoned cottage. Eventually, their horses led the way through the treacherous moor back to the inn. For further information about du Maurier and her relationship to Cornwall, see www.dumaurier.org, which has a bibliography and numerous related links.
The infamous Jamaica Inn—its smugglers, ghosts, murderers, and barren moor—is described with suitable gore and gothic relish in the resort's souvenir guide, Jamaica Inn and Museum.
I read about Peale's, Scudder's, and Drake's museums in the SAT annual reports and also in Charles Coleman Sellers's Mr. Peale's Museum. I also visited the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, site of the original museum.
I read about the Victorian mania for natural history and the state of science museums in the pre- and post-Darwin era in Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History. This, combined with the general history of taxidermy, helped me create the context in which Walter Potter lived, worked, and built his stupendous collection.
Bruce Schwendeman and Emma Hawkins generously supplied me with materials from their personal archives, including early catalogs of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities before it moved to Cornwall. I relied on these to write about Potter's life—what drove him and how he approached taxidermy—and also to trace the evolution of his museum from 1861 to 1986, when John and Wendy Watts bought it. For the museum's post-1986 history, I relied chiefly on the Bonhams press release, interviews, and newspaper articles.
Pat Morris's splendid article "An Historical Review of Bird Taxidermy in Britain" describes the bird displays at the Great Exhibition of 1851, including John Hancock's gyrfalcons and the original usage of the word "jizz." A History of British Taxidermy by Christopher Frost chronicles taxidermy's rise and fall. It also describes the era's leading taxidermists, such as Hancock and Herrmann Ploucquet and how they practiced their trade during taxidermy's most faddish epoch. Montagu Browne's Practical Taxidermy describes how the Great Exhibition of 1851 led to the rise of artistic taxidermy in Britain.
Charles Waterton's quotes are from his book Wanderings in South America.
Calke Abbey is a 1622 country house filled with glass cases containing fascinating collections acquired by several generations of the Harpur-Crewe family. Sir Vauncey Harpur-Crewe's late-nineteenth-century natural history cases—including domed birds, butterflies, and eggs; Egyptian curiosities; a crocodile skull; deer heads; and fossils—are still on display in period rooms that have been restored by the National Trust, which has owned the property since 1985. I toured Calke Abbey with the exceptionally knowledgeable Pat Morris. For those unable to visit, the National Trust's guidebook (1989) provides an excellent virtual tour.
For information about El Negro, see "Gaborone Journal; Africa Rejoices as a Wandering Soul Finds Rest" by Rachel L. Swarns, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/06/world/gaborone-journal-africa-rejoices-as-a-wandering-soul-finds-rest.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. This article appeared in the New York Times on October 6, 2000.
I discovered the wonderful word "anthropomorphophobic" in The Postmodern Animal by Steve Baker.
Details about Errol Fuller appeared in New Scientist, May 2004; the Vancouver Sun, May 15, 2004; the Guardian, November 13, 1999; the Observer, April 10, 1994; and the Spectator, November 8, 2003.
Richard Taylor's campaign to save the museum was reported in the Guardian on September 8, 2003. Damien Hirst's efforts to buy Potter's appeared in the Financial Times on September 24, 2003, and in Cornwall's local daily, the Western Morning News, on September 24, 2003, which also reported that Bonhams said it had no record of Hirst's offer. His letter in the Guardian, titled "Mr. Potter, Stuffed Rats and Me," ran on September 23, 2003; see www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/sep/23/heritage.
Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, on the waterfront below the Pike Place Market in Seattle, has human mummies.
For information about the post-auction legal dispute, see "Strange Case of Damien Hirst and the Stuffed Squirrel Sale," Times (London), December 6, 2007, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3007o8g.ece. When I asked Bonhams whether the legal dispute had been resolved, the auction house had no comment.
Facts about Damien Hirst and his artworks, including his quotes, are primarily from On the Way to Work by Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn; Damien Hirst, the exhibition catalog for his show at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, Italy, in 2004; I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now; and Carol Vogel's critiques in the New York Times.
I read about "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" in Martin Gayford's article "Would You Adam and Eve It?" in the Telegraph Magazine (February 28, 2004). The New York Times ran a piece on the replacement tiger shark on October 1, 2006. The newspaper and magazine reviews of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" were all published in February and March of 2004.
I read about Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996) and in Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal. Hirst describes how he feels about Bacon in On the Way to Work.
The New York Times published an article that describes the crucified cows on October 1, 2006; Damien Hirst describes the similar concept in On the Way to Work: "I want to do a cow hacked open like that with its arms open. I'm going to do three, sixteen foot. A whole crucifixion. Can't resist it. Sixteen-foot tanks. Massive. With all cows skinned and peeled apart ... Fantastic."
The basis for Edmonton's "inferiority complex" is from a discussion I had with my friend Tim Tokarsky, an Edmontonian who studied geophysics. I was also incredibly lucky to find myself seated next to Leah Dolgoy, another spirited Edmontonian, on the flight to Alberta.
In addition to Ken Walker's encyclopedic knowledge, my primary source for information about Megaloceros giganteus—phylogenetic, historic, and cultural—was the Irish elk chapter in Extinct by Anton Gill and Alex West (Macmillan, 2003). I also used the following articles, essays, and academic papers: "A Lesson from the Old Masters" by Stephen Jay Gould ( Natural History, August 1996); "The Phylogenetic Position of the 'Giant Deer' Megaloceros giganteus" by A. M. Lister, C. J. Edwards, D.A.W. Nock, M. Bunce, I. A. van Pijlen, D. G. Bradley, M. G. Thomas, and I. Barnes ( Nature, December 2005); "Why Antlers Branched Out" by Valerius Geist ( Natural History, April 1994); "Irish Elk Survived After Ice Age Ended" by Sid Perkins ( Science News, November 6, 2004); "DNA Pegs Irish Elk's Nearest Relatives" by Sid Perkins ( Science News, October 1, 2005); "Giants Survived Human Onslaught" by Ross MacPhee ( New Scientist, November 13, 2004); "Survival of the Irish Elk into the Holocene" by Silvia Gonzales, Andrew Kitchener, and Adrian M. Lister (Nature, June 15, 2000); "The Case of the Irish Elk" (www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/artio/irishelk.html, n.d.); "Extinct Giant Deer Survived Ice Age, Study Says" by James Owen (National Geographic News, October 6, 2004); "Extinct Giant Deer's Descendant Found in U.K." (www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/giantdeer, September 4, 2005). I found "The Giant Irish Deer—A Victim of the Ice Age" by Frank Mitchell on the Irish Peatland Conservation Council Web site, www.ipcc.ie/infoirishelk.html; it originally appeared in the Shell Guide to Reading the Irish Landscape (Town House & Country House, 1986).
Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, was deeply moved by Ireland's peat bogs and mined them for inspiration. I read about this in "The Great Irish Elk: Seamus Heaney's Personal Helicon" by William Pratt (World Literature Today, Spring 1996). In it, Pratt says, "Heaney had described his own creative process as if it had lain for a while in the earth beside the Great Irish elk: 'I have always listened for poems, they come sometimes like bodies come out of a bog, almost complete, seeming to have been laid down a long time ago, surfacing with a torch of mystery.'"
I read about the Chauvet cave in Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave, the Oldest Known Paintings in the World by Jean Clottes. "Grotte Chauvet Archeologically Dated" by Dr. Christian Zuchner of the Institute of Prehistory, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, appeared in TRACCE (February 2000). This incredible iconographic study compares seven megaloceros paintings and motifs from different periods and caves in France.
British anatomist Richard Owen's questions about the skeletal and muscular structure of the Irish elk are from Gould's essay "A Lesson from the Old Masters."
The alarming rate of extinction is sadly easy to document. The United Nations figure is from "Global Diversity Outlook 2," a paper prepared by the Convention on Biological Diversity (2006). The New York Times article "A Rising Number of Birds at Risk" ran on December 1, 2007. The frightening statistics about China's dwindling mammal species and an account of its last two Yangtze giant soft-shell turtles both come from a particularly affecting article in the New York Times by Jim Yardley called "Then There Were Two: Turtles' Fate Shows Threat to China's Species," which ran on December 5, 2007. On June 12, 2007, the New York Times reported that the last two white rhinos in Zambia had been shot by poachers.
All flawed squirrel anatomy described in this chapter is my fault alone and in no way reflects the squirrel output at Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio. David and Bruce did their best to turn a stuffer into a taxidermist; the rest was my undoing.
William Hornaday's quote about "stuffed monstrosities" is from his essay "Common Faults in the Mounting of Quadrupeds," which appeared in the SAT's 1884 annual report. This report also contains the information about the 1883 SAT convention and the exhibit "A Taxidermist's Sanctum."
Taxidermy manuals are fascinating to look at and to read. I mention four of them in this chapter: The Breakthrough Mammal Taxidermy Manual by Brent Houskeeper (B. Publications, 1990); Montagu Browne's Practical Taxidermy (1878); Oliver Davie's Methods in the Art of Taxidermy (1894); and William Hornaday's Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting (1891; I used the 1916 edition).
Leon Pray was an American taxidermist who wrote one of the most popular taxidermy manuals in the United States. In 1972, his Taxidermy was in its twenty-sixth edition. Bruce Schwendeman's exceptionally rare first-edition copy of Pray's "The Squirrel Mounting Book," a pamphlet published by Modern Taxidermist in 1938, sat on my desk for years, unopened.
I read about Roy Orbison on several Web sites, including Billboard online, Wikipedia, and RoyOrbison.com.
WITHOUT THE PEOPLE who shared their lives with me, this book would not exist. My heartfelt thanks go to David and Bruce Schwendeman, Ken Walker, and Emily Mayer and their families. These gifted artists welcomed me into their homes and studios, fed me, lent me books and articles, and answered my questions until I finally understood. I will miss hanging around their workshops.
My thanks to all the taxidermists, collectors, scientists, curators, conservators, antiques dealers, artists, and enthusiasts for their unstinting contributions to this book. Taxidermists David Astley, Larry Blomquist, Carl Church, Jack Fishwick, Frank Greenwell, Jerry Jackson, Joe Kish, Dave Luke, Roger Martin, John Matthews, Paul Rhymer, Dave Spaul, Jan van Hoesen, and countless others helped me gain an understanding of their art form. Jessica Stevens was the kindest judge an amateur squirrel mounter could hope for.
My research was made easier by the assistance of the staff of the American Museum of Natural History library. I am grateful to thank Floyd Easterman for providing me with copies of the SAT annual reports and William Hornaday's personal scrapbook. Karen Wonders traded me a copy of "Habitat Dioramas" for a copy of Still Life; my book could not have existed without her scholarship. Conservator Catharine Hawks referred me to important sources and leads. Emma Hawkins faxed me two old Potter's catalogs. Conservation scientist Amandine Péquignot was a big help in the eleventh hour.
Fish curator Oliver Crimmen took me on two fascinating tours of the Natural History Museum storeroom and gave me useful articles; Pat Morris and Mary Burgis served as superb guides in England; and Steve Quinn led me around the AMNH dioramas and reviewed my Akeley chapter for accuracy. And Stephanie Adler-Yuan tackled the daunting task of fact checking the entire book.
A writer couldn't ask for a smarter agent, friend, and editor than Tina Bennett. Tina believed in this project through its growing pains and through what turned out to be many changes in the publishing world. Only Tina saw the potential of taxidermy before it was fashionable. Her exact words were, "Who knew there was so much life in taxidermy?"
I am indebted to David Corcoran of the New York Times for assigning the germinal article and Studio 360 for producing my radio segment on the Schwendemans.
Andrea Schulz and Eamon Dolan, book editors extraordinaire, vastly improved the book on every level, from armature to hiding the seams and imperfections. I thank them for their encouragement, insight, and wit, as well as for challenging me to do what I thought was impossible: write with authority and be myself. Thanks also to Svetlana Katz, Rick Tetzeli, Lindsey Smith, Barbara Jatkola, and everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Of all the people who now know more about taxidermy than they ever thought possible, I'd like to thank my very supportive parents, Marcia and Paul Milgrom, and the other Milgroms: Steve, Robin, Arthur, and Jake. My friends, whose moral support was boundless, deserve a week at the spa on me: Frieda Alutin, Erma Estwick, Camille Korschun-Bastillo, Lorraine McCune, Nathalie Schueller, Lisa Waltuch, and Ulalume Zavala. And, of course, I'd especially like to thank Eric, Sabine, and Greta for their incredible patience and for believing that all families take vacations to see Jeremy Bentham and talk about squirrels at the dinner table.