Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

who has ever seriously investigated the topic (doctoral students, curators, artists, historians, conservators) inevitably finds him, because his personal archive contains things that no one else in the world has—at least not all in one place. Sometimes he'll photocopy a deceased taxidermist's sketchbook for a library so that he won't have the only copy in existence. That doesn't mean he's exceptionally generous; he has a reputation as a shrewd barterer, using information as leverage to acquire mounts for his collection.

The guild is honored to have Morris as a member, and the other members sit in somber silence watching slides he has culled from his archive. What he shows us is essentially a history of neglect. For the first time in days, the guild members are silent—not a single wisecrack. Even Fishwick is quiet.

Mayer removes her sunglasses and watches as Morris shows mounts destroyed by natural causes (moths, beetles, sun); mounts ruined by accidents and fires; mounts dismantled because of "politically correct" museum policy; mounts bombed during World War II. He shows anthropomorphic foxes from the Great Exhibition of 1851, now sadly estranged from their historic context; distorted whales stored too close to hot boilers; and taxidermy collections quietly given away out of embarrassment, languishing in museum storerooms, or simply vanished. This is a taxidermy death knell.

It's also a fitting prelude to yet another loss, the auctioning off of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities, an astounding collection of Victorian taxidermy. The auction is being held in two days, and the guild members are horrified to lose this "little bit of taxidermy history." No one is more aware of what the auction means than Morris. Victorian taxidermy is his area of expertise. In fact, he would have taught a course on the subject if interdisciplinary departments had been common early in his career, and if some of his colleagues didn't equate his passion for taxidermy with cruelty to animals. His love of taxidermy is actually an outgrowth of his deep appreciation for natural history, and he believes you cannot study the history of one without the other.

Morris has spent more than thirty years searching for old museum mounts. He asks how a museum could lose six upright polar bears or groups of fighting tigers. Where are these things? He's on the prowl for them. Sometimes he is bewildered by what he discovers. In the mid-1980s, for instance, he visited the Smithsonian Institution and found Hornaday's white setter on the scent of quail, called Coming to the Point, in the attic, on its side, dusty and forgotten. Unlike Hornaday's landmark baby elephant, at least it had surfaced, and Morris didn't have to wonder how a museum could misplace an elephant, of all things.

If given permission, Morris will go to extremes to authenticate a specimen. Once, in 1981, the dean of Westminster Abbey allowed him to x-ray the duchess of Richmond's three-hundred-year-old stuffed African grey parrot. He took the images in the crypt that contains the wax effigy of Lord Nelson, confirming that the parrot was indeed mounted using methods abandoned by the 1800s and therefore "one of the oldest surviving stuffed birds in existence."

Sometimes Morris's efforts are misunderstood, and he is called eccentric. However, not long after the guild show, the director of the Natural History Museum invited him to lunch, perhaps to placate him after the museum destroyed three Rowland Ward dioramas, works Morris considered the best they had in Britain.

And now he stands before Emily Mayer and the guild and says, "We're about to see another case of loss. On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week will be the auctioning off of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities. The rumor is that quite a bit of this will go to America. This is a permanent loss to Britain, but so far no one has come forward to buy it because it's taxidermy."

6. MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES

THE TRAIN FROM EXETER to Bodmin follows the English Channel past fishing hamlets and manor houses with seemingly endless hedgerows. On a sunny day, the jagged cliffs above the harbors live up to the region's nickname: the Cornish Riviera. But now rain and fog shrouded everything except the most colorful skiffs, and that was fine with me, because the weather seemed to come directly from the book I was reading, Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn. The 1936 gothic romance, inspired by Treasure Island, compared to Jane Eyre, and adapted into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock (as were du Maurier's The Birds and Rebecca), seems to have defined Cornwall. Indeed, the Cornish still refer to the region as "Du Maurier Country," and looking out the train window at the dark sky moving in over the blustery moors, I could see why.

In writing the novel, du Maurier drew from Cornwall's history of wreckers and smugglers. She centered the book on Mary Yellan, a twenty-three-year-old "orphan" who moves to the Jamaica Inn, a gloomy old coach house, to live with her aunt Patience and uncle Joss. Joss, Mary soon learns, is the leader of a band of evil wreckers, who lure ships onto the rocky coast, kill the fleeing crew, and steal the cargo. One night she is forced to go on a run with them. The wreckers in the novel are sinister and cutthroat. The solitary inn is based on a real smugglers' tavern from the mid-1700s, which is now a resort that contains not only the tavern but other attractions, including Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities, my destination.

The Jamaica Inn is located on a barren moor, halfway down the Cornish peninsula, a promontory shaped like the bent, knobby finger of a witch. More than thirty thousand people visited the inn annually, a remarkable number given its isolation. They didn't all come to see taxidermy; most came to relive Cornwall's tangle with the wreckers, something the inn flaunts. On this day, however, dealers and collectors from all over the world were descending on the place for a two-day auction of what was billed as one of the most