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Books to Buy:
From sixteenth-century cabinets of wonders to provocative works of contemporary animal art, my book The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing examines the cultural and poetic history of preserving animals in lively postures.
Read more about the book here +
History of Taxidermy & Natural History Museums:
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Stephen Asma's enjoyable history of natural history museums and their ordering principles. |
Photographs and images of the Harvard Musem of Natural History's exceptional collection of natural artefacts. |
Images and history behind the American Museum of Natural History's famous dioramas. |
| Building great natural history museums takes more than great specimens. Carla Yanni examines the role of architecture in the establishment of Victorian catherdrals of nature. | Paula Findlen's classic work on the history of early modern collecting and cabinets of wonders. | A history of habitat Dioramas and illusions of wilderness in natural history Museums by Karen Wonders. Out of print, but worth tracking down. |
| A neat overview of the making of the dioramas at the Field Museum in Chicago. | A catalogue of the taxidermied dog collecion at Tring Museum by Juliet Clutton-Brock and Kim Dennis-Bryan | Melissa Milgrom's fabulous romp through the wild world of taxidermy. |
| Jay Kirk's biography of Carl Akeley, the mad behind some of America's greatest dioramas. |
Collecting Interests:
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Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome: a Cultural Life of Polar Bears: Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson's quest to find and photograph every stuffed polar bear in Great Britain. |
Rosamund Purcell's photographs of rare, endangered, and extinct species preserved in natural history museums. |
Although mainly concerning romantic era collecting, Judith Pascoe's book has an excellent chapter on stuffed hummingbirds in early nineteenth-century England. |
| The photographic stories of eight collectors. Text by Stephen Jay Gould and photographs by Rosamund Wolff Purcell. | Philipp Blom's highly readable book of short essays on some of the great collectors and collections of the last four centuries including a few collectors of taxidermy. | A volume of essays including my essay "Botched Animals and Enigmatic Beasts," which explores the world of early modern nature collecting. |
Animals & Animal Studies:
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Steve Baker explores animals and animal imagery in contemporary art, with a special emphasis on what he terms "botched taxidermy." |
An anthology of essays on killing animals from the Animal Studies Group. Authors include Steve Baker, Erica Fudge, and Jonathan Burt. |
David Quammen takes on maneaters (bears, sharks, crocodiles) with several excursions into taxidermy |
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A collecting of essays presenting a cross-cultural, cross-historical look at animals including a look at taxidermy by Jane Desmond. |