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September 18, 2008
Future Books
When this makes it to audible I'll be listening: Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, Richard Fortey. From the New York Times book review:
One entrance to the Other Museum stands behind the massive skeleton of the giant ground sloth. Another is opposite the crocodiles. For the building that houses the public galleries of London’s Natural History Museum also houses an entirely different museum — a working museum, where the aim isn’t public edification or entertainment but the care, cataloging and description of millions of different life-forms, both extinct and extant, as well as thousands of different minerals. An inventory of the planet.The offices, laboratories, libraries and vast storerooms of the Other Museum are wrapped around the public galleries like ivy on a fence. The storerooms house about 80 million specimens, from whale skeletons and jars of mites to stacks of pressed flowers and meteorites. The offices house a collection of — judging by Richard Fortey’s entertaining memoir, “Dry Storeroom No. 1” — extremely eccentric scholars.
. . .
And then there’s our guide, Richard Fortey himself. Trilobite expert, tiddlywinks player, mushroom hunter, poetry enthusiast and ardent lover of the museum, Fortey joined the staff of the paleontology department in 1970. He tells us that at the time he joined, the museum was so hierarchical that there were separate lavatories for “scientific officers” and “gentlemen.” (Both, however, were supplied with toilet paper that had “Government Property” stamped on each sheet.) The common room was wreathed in cigar smoke (now to smoke you have to go outside); and every morning you had to collect your keys from a warder.
They have a first chapter at the NYT - go read.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at September 18, 2008 10:11 AM