Erosion molding is described in A Guide to Model Making and Taxidermy by Leo J. Cappel (A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1973).
Emily Mayer and John Loker let me keep their copy of Dipped in Vitriol by Nicholas Parsons (Pan Books, 1981).
Pets, Usual and Unusual by Maxwell Knight was originally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. I used the 1962 edition.
Irmelin Mayer and I stayed up very late one night talking about Emily's childhood and flipping through family scrapbooks. The next day, she generously let me photocopy all the articles about Emily. The titles alone bear mentioning: "Girl Taxidermist Loves Job"; "OK, Where Does a Taxidermist Pick Up a Dead Camel?"; "Emily Can Ferret Out a Bargain!"; "She Keeps Bodies: Unusual Job for Emily, 19"; "Tinker, Tailor, Taxidermist"; "Chipping In with the Fish"; "Illustrious Corpses"; "Get Stuffed! If You'll Pardon the Expression"; "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of"; "Dead Clever; Change of Course as Emily Tackles Sculpture"; "Life After Death."
Emily and Irmelin Mayer graciously provided me with sources on Lotte Pritzel. These include Lotte Pritzel: Puppen des Lasters des Grauens und der Ekstase (Puppentheatermuseum, 1987); Hans Bellmer, a biography of the controversial surrealist by Peter Webb (Quartet Books, 1985); "'They've Got Souls of White Cotton, the Little Darlings!': Lotte Pritzel and Her Wax Figurines," an unpublished scholarly work by Barbara Borek; and "Fragments," Irmelin Mayer's unpublished autobiographical work about growing up in Nazi-era Berlin.
The quote comparing a Hirst show to Jack the Ripper perpetrating a crime is from Richard Shone's essay "Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away" in the catalog for the show (Serpentine Gallery, London, 1994).
For a deeper understanding of how England and America differed in their approaches to natural history and specimen collecting, see Joyce Chaplin's article "Nature and Nation: Natural History in Context," in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730—1860, edited by Sue Ann Prince (American Philosophical Society, 2003).
I read about how Lionel Walter Rothschild liked to outbid the British Museum in The Heyday of Natural History by Lynn Barber. "My Museum: The Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, Tring" by Tring's bird skins preparator Katrina Cook appeared in the 2006 issue of Taxidermist; it describes the history of the museum and what it contains today. The anecdote about how the baron was blackmailed into selling off his peerless bird collection is from Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston (St. Martin's Press, 1986).
For information about the Powell-Cotton Museum, see "Quex House and the Powell-Cotton Museum" by Richard Crowhurst, www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/museums/quex.shtml, 2006. Also see the Powell-Cotton Museum Web site, www.quexmuseum.org.
Charles Waterton may have been exasperating, but he was never boring. This made writing about him painful, because I had to omit how he used to crawl under a table and bark like a dog, along with just about everything he ever said or wrote. The surviving Waterton quotes and quirks are chiefly drawn from his somewhat reliable expedition memoir Wanderings in South America. I used the 1889 edition, which includes an endearing biography of the squire (complete with drawings of Walton Hall's pigpens, breeding tower, and lofty trees) by the Reverend J. G. Wood, as well as an explanatory essay on his taxidermy methods. I found his quote about possessing "Promethean boldness" and his use of Horace's "By laboring to be brief you become obscure" in an essay by Dr. J. B. Holder in the SAT's 1884 annual report; they are also in Wanderings.
For the account of the Nondescript, I used Wanderings. Author Errol Fuller e-mailed his own very endearing description, and Lynn Barber describes this "taxidermic frolic" in The Heyday of Natural History.
The Watertonian terms "pseudo-classical phraseology" and "complimentary nomenclature" are from the biography by Wood in Wanderings. "You must possess Promethean boldness..." and "A hideous spectacle of death in ragged plumage" are from Wanderings.
Montagu Browne calls Waterton an "eccentric genius" and "pioneer" and also describes his methods for making peacock faces and scraping out ape feet in his two manuals: Practical Taxidermy: Manual of Instruction to the Amateur in Collecting, Preserving, and Setting Up Natural History Specimens of All Kinds, 2nd ed. (L. Upcott Gill, 1884), and Artistic and Scientific Taxidermy and Modelling (Adam and Charles Black, 1896).
"Chairbitch is OK too" is from "View from the Chair," Emily Mayer's inaugural letter as chair to the guild journal, Taxidermist (2002).
Kim McDonald's article "E-bay—You Are Being Watched! Internet Auctions and the Natural History Specimen" ran in Taxidermist in 2006. The Get Stuffed scandal has been widely publicized in the United Kingdom. The Independent ran a story on it at the time on February 2, 2000, and the Guardian covered it retrospectively on August 8, 2008. The Birmingham Evening Mail reported that the Metropolitan Police Wildlife Crime Unit seized more than twenty thousand endangered species in 2000.
The history of the Guild of Taxidermists is from Emily Mayer's graduate thesis, "Representing Animality," and Christopher Frost's A History of British Taxidermy.
Information about Rowland Ward and his illustrious wildlife studio primarily came from Pat Morris's self-published monograph Rowland Ward: Taxidermist to the World (2003), which also has amazing photos. Front and Wonders ("Habitat Dioramas") also cover Ward.
"The Antiquity of the Duchess of Richmond's Parrot," Pat Morris's account of how he x-rayed the duchess's stuffed African grey parrot, appeared in Museums Journal 81, no. 3 (1981). I went to Westminster Abbey to see the parrot in 2003.
6. MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES
Daphne du Maurier was inspired to write Jamaica Inn after an ill-fated outing on Bodmin Moor. The story goes like this: One day she was staying at the Jamaica Inn and went out riding in the moor with a friend. A storm broke, and they were forced to seek shelter in an abandoned cottage. Eventually, their horses led the way through the treacherous moor back to the inn. For further information about du Maurier and her relationship to Cornwall, see www.dumaurier.org, which has a bibliography and numerous related links.
The infamous Jamaica Inn—its
