After thirty years spent in the beautiful bowels of the Natural History Museum studying trilobites, Richard Fortey has emerged with a supreme achievement. ‘Dry Store Room No 1’ is not just a wonderfully entertaining and rambling social history of the South Kensington museum and the characters who have worked there. It’s a tightly argued and vivacious hymn to the vitality of science, a defence of the relevance and beauty of everything in nature from the smallest mollusc to the oldest meteorite to the dullest lichen.
Fortey’s strength – aside from his enthusiasm, wit, knowledge and gift with prose – is that he is not afraid to go full sail into the nitty-gritty of technical areas such as taxonomy, confident that his readers will follow him into unfamiliar waters and emerge wiser for the experience. In confronting rather than avoiding the complicated and the arcane, he enhances his central argument that the Natural History Museum serves as a valuable repository of the sort of serious brains needed to make sense of our planet and, perhaps, anticipate its future.
He’s also excellent at drawing out the human side of the museum – the absent-minded mosquito man, the illicit still in the model whale, the taxonomist who kept index cards for his sexual conquests – and keen to bridge the gap between art and science, spotting his text with quotes from Eliot and Blake (sometimes a little self-consciously, it should be said). Every museum deserves such a biography.
