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

beside the point. She was meeting Errol Fuller, author and illustrator of books on extinct and rare birds, and Rob Chinnery, owner of the Victorian Taxidermy Company in Leamington Spa. When we arrived in Fowey, I found the last vacancy in town—in a guesthouse run by a red-bearded man with a red ponytail, who resembled one of du Maimer's Cornish wreckers. When he opened the door, he had a live parrot on his shoulder, a shocking sight after so many days among dead things.

Hawkins checked into the Marina Hotel on the wharf and began riffling through her Bonhams catalog, frenetically writing notes in the margins as she called clients to confer. She had a strategy. It involved her fiancé, who was on telephone standby in Edinburgh. The plan was simple: She'd bid at the auction until her lots reached the price she and her fiancé had agreed on beforehand. When the price climbed above that, she'd set down her paddle, and he'd take up the bidding remotely by phone. Hawkins would watch from the sidelines, feigning a lack of interest. The strategy, fairly common among serious auctiongoers, requires a poker face. Hawkins has one with dimples.

Whereas Hawkins was here to purchase taxidermy for clients with unusual tastes, Fuller was motivated by his own obsessive habit. Fuller has been collecting Victorian taxidermy since he was fifteen. His house is crammed with taxidermy cases, dinosaur fossils, and prehistoric skulls. There's practically no room to walk. Some of his treasures are exceptionally rare, such as a case of 350 hummingbirds ("appalling" but "beautiful, because of their colors, not faded at all"). He has an ichthyosaur in his living room and an ammonite in his bathroom. One of Rowland Ward's lions that used to belong to Eton College resides in his garage, where he keeps his overflow. But his prize possession is Charles Waterton's saki monkey (a South American species), which was "lost" for 150 years. Fuller found it in an antiques shop in Greenwich. "I'm going to be buried with it!" he said. An amateur boxer turned painter turned self-taught natural historian, Fuller is the author of The Great Auk and The Dodo. "Mostly I've written about extinct things—mostly bones or stuffed ones," he explained. "It's my inability to cope with death. I think it starts with that—just like the Egyptians couldn't cope with it. You can't look at that fox. That individual fox tolls for thee."

The fox comment is very Victorian, and in some ways so is Fuller. He's a passionate amateur like Charles Darwin or John James Audubon, but instead of traveling to exotic locales to shoot, stuff, and study, say, Galápagos finches, Fuller visits far-flung museums, where he tracks down every known dried skin and plume of the extinct birds he's investigating, which he reproduces in paintings, formulating theories of substantial scientific merit along the way.

Fuller's obsession with extinct animals is extraordinary. When he wrote The Great Auk, for instance, he spent six years chasing down every great auk skin and egg in existence and had to drive a taxi to finance the book. His book on the dodo, a species that vanished in 1690, was far less grueling to research, because hardly any dodo skins exist, plus "all the known skeletons came from the same swamp in Mauritius."

"Have you carved up everything without me?" Fuller said to Hawkins as she walked into the restaurant. "She thinks she's outgrown me," he said to me. "She was the greediest little child! Emma tried to buy the whole lot!"

"I wouldn't buy taxidermy there that wasn't Potter," she said.

"Most people hate taxidermy for bogus reasons. They think it's disrespect for the dead creatures and that you are promoting it," said Fuller.

"Taxidermy connotes the taint of bad taste. Why is that?" Fuller's girlfriend asked.

"Quality affects it," offered Chinnery.

"It's like pickling your grandmother!" said the girlfriend.

We sat down to dinner, but instead of menus everyone held up auction catalogs. Images of distorted baby giraffes greeted the waitress. Fuller explained that the auction had no "reserves"; that is, Bonhams had not established a minimum price for each lot and therefore was willing to let it all go—whatever happens, happens. That fact was exciting yet sad.

Fuller flipped through his catalog, pausing at the duck-billed platypus (lot 182), and said, "I was thinking how badly I wanted that platypus thirty years ago. I would have given anything for it. We'll probably go home with nothing, and the Americans will go home with it."

"Very beautiful," said Hawkins with a demonic grin that concealed what she was admiring in her own catalog. Fuller yanked the catalog out of her hands. Hawkins yanked it back. Then Fuller's girlfriend threatened to snatch it so she could eat in peace. "We don't need a neutral referee!" Fuller snapped. "This is war!"

"I'd put three grand on that elephant head," said Chinnery.

Chinnery, no slouch in this absurdly narrow world, restores Victorian cases and resells them to a highly specialized clientele. One of his customers is his accountant, Mark Godfrey, who was seated at our table. Godfrey's business card didn't say ACCOUNTANT; it said TAXIDERMY COLLECTOR: HUTCHINGS OF ABERYSTWYTH and depicted two barn owls.

Chinnery and Fuller decided to go in on a lot together. They said they hadn't seen any "serious" people at the preview, and therefore no one would have the same combined diversity of their interests. It buoyed their spirits, but they kept their lot to themselves.

Then Fuller glared at Hawkins. "Stay off of my list!" he warned her. "Otherwise, I'll break your heart on something else!"

On the walk up the steep hill to my guesthouse, I realized how tired my eyes were from all I had seen. Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities was amazing. But by the end of the auction, the exhibits would be crated up and packed into vans or into shipping containers destined for Britannia tankers bound for other countries. As I made my way up the hill, I felt depressed. I had hoped that someone would rescue the collection