Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum
Richard Fortey—one of the world’s most gifted natural scientists and acclaimed author of Life, Trilobite and Earth—describes this splendid new book as a museum of the mind. But it is, as well, a perfect behind-the-scenes guide to a legendary place. Within its pages, London’s Natural History...
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Richard Fortey—one of the world’s most gifted natural scientists and acclaimed author of Life, Trilobite and Earth—describes this splendid new book as a museum of the mind. But it is, as well, a perfect behind-the-scenes guide to a legendary place. Within its pages, London’s Natural History Museum, a home of treasures—plants from the voyage of Captain Cook, barnacles to which Charles Darwin devoted years of study, hidden accursed jewels—pulses with life and miraculous surprises. In an elegant and illuminating narrative, Fortey acquaints the reader with the extraordinary people, meticulous research and driving passions that helped to create the timeless experiences of wonder that fill the museum. And with the museum’s hallways and collection rooms providing a dazzling framework, Fortey offers an often eye-opening social history of the scientific accomplishments of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Fortey’s scholarship dances with wit. Here is a book that is utterly entertaining from its first page to its last.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780307275523 (0307275523)
ASIN: 307275523
Publish date: 2009-09-08
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages no: 352
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
Autobiography,
Memoir,
History,
European Literature,
British Literature,
Science,
Popular Science,
Environment,
Nature,
Natural History,
Biology
Dry Store Room No. 1 was a kind of miscellaneous repository, a place of institutional amnesia. It was rumoured that it was also the site of trysts, although love in the shadow of the sunfish must have been needy rather than romantic. Certainly, it was a place unlikely to be disturbed until it was di...
I loved this book, but holy crap I can't believe it's taken me this long to read it. I don't think it's ever taken me this long to finish a book. If you love museums, if you love natural history, if you've ever thought the idea of getting lost in the back rooms of a museum sounded like something ...