Dry Storeroom No.1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

When I was a kid I had fantasies that, among others, included making a home of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. The mummies, the scintillating gem room...I wanted to eat, sleep and play there. As a high school student I actually gave some thought to a career in a field that would involve working at the museum; something like archeology a la Indiana Jones. Then I grew up...

“Fortey uses the precision of a scientist and the intimacy of an anthropologist to reveal the rivalries, scandals, and quirks of the museum's resident characters.”

Review:

Dry Storeroom No. 1 is a natural history of natural-history museums, as told by a native inhabitant of one of the industry's finest institutions. Richard Fortey is a former senior paleontologist at London's prestigious Natural History Museum and the acclaimed author of Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution and Life: An Unauthorized Biography. Although Fortey spent his career exploring evolution's labyrinth, Dry Storeroom is as much about the diversity of dead specimens as the living people who find, collect, and classify them.

The allure of natural-history museums lies in their exotic — and sometimes downright weird — collections. London's scientific cathedral houses plants collected by Captain Cook on his voyages, blood-red crystals that seemingly wilt if exposed to light, and more than 70 million other items of natural novelty. The museum also boasts a grand legacy of passionate geekdom and eccentricity: resident scientist Edward Heron-Allen, a turn-of-the-century expert on the single-celled foraminifera family, also spent his years as a linguist, novelist, and violin maker; Herbert Wernham, a botany curator-cum-Casanova, collected the (ahem) pubic hair of his lovers; and butterfly expert Dick Vane-Wright rivaled his tropical specimens' flamboyant colors with his own exuberant, paisley-patterned waistcoats. Fortey uses the precision of a scientist and the intimacy of an anthropologist to reveal the rivalries, scandals, and quirks of the museum's resident characters.

Fortey rummages through the institution's idiosyncratic past while reexamining his own episodic career with rambling wit. Although he celebrates technological advancements — the advent of DNA extraction techniques, for instance, which transformed an extinct bird's previously discarded bones into a revolutionary research opportunity — his book contains a subtle nostalgia. By unlocking his storeroom of memories, Fortey recaptures a sense of wide-eyed wonder for the physical and social world. - Chelsea Bauch