Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors

Most of us collect things, but seldom have entire collections been preserved.

A few that did survive have fallen, figuratively, into the clutches of two brilliant innovators: photographer Rosamond Wolff Purcell and palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. What these collections say about the collectors, and about human beings in general, is the subject of this strangely beautiful book.

Here are Purcell’s wonderfully exotic photographs of teeth and other human artefacts from the collection of Peter the Great; moles, pigs, and dogs from van Heurn’s many boxes of perfectly preserved skins; and all manner of preserved life from Rothschild’s Birds of Paradise to the fish of Agassiz. Here also is Gould at his best, delighting in the unusual and making connections to our own history and evolution. He reminds us of the links between passionate curiosity and science. And he makes clear that many of these collectors – driven by a desire to know and to possess the riches of nature – were as strange as their collections. Among the most memorable are the amateurs, such as Thomas Hawkins, a demented dinosaur hunter, and Mary Anning from Lyme Regis, one of the unsung heroines of palaeontology.