# The Secret Museum

Molly Oldfield

The Secret Museum is a unique treasure trove of the most intriguing artifacts hidden away in museum archives from all over the world – curated, brought to light, and brought to life by Molly Oldfield in a beautifully illustrated collection.Who knows what’s hidden from view? Locked away in cabinets, secure storage and aircraft hangars.Most of a museum’s collection never gets seen. It sits in the quiet dark of an archive waiting for a treasure hunter or obsessive researcher to root out its very existence. Under the streets of Manhattan priceless books are shelved; brick outbuildings in London’s East End house drawers of Victorian embroidery remembering foundlings long ago dead; body bags in Washington clothe space suits covered in real moon dust and in an unvisited aircraft hangar sits Auguste Piccard’s extraordinary invention, the balloon gondola…This and many other extraordinary inventions, legacies, discoveries and artefacts have been visited and curated by Molly Oldfield into a Secret Museum. Rich in atmosphere and anecdote, suffused with the surprising emotion of a personal discovery, but grounded in fascinating factual detail, this is a unique and beautifully illustrated book.The Secret Museum reveals sixty unknown artefacts and stories from all five continents, from Rome to Rio and Boston to Berlin. And like the very best mornings spent at a museum it promises to be idiosyncratic, surprising and enormously good fun.The Artefacts in the book include: An original Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum, Harrison Schmitt’s Space Suit, A piece of Newton’s Apple Tree, Van Gogh’s Sketchbooks, The original drawings of Wimbledon’s Centre Court, Dickens’ letter opener,Three pieces of Mars, and much more…

## CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A GUTENBERG BIBLE ON VELLUM

HARRISON SCHMITT’S SPACE SUIT

THREE PIECES OF MARS

A PIECE OF NEWTON’S APPLE TREE

THE FIRST CULTIVATED PEARLS

LAMOUROUXIA VISCOSA SEED FROM MEXICO

THINGS BENEATH THE FLOORBOARDS

A BEJEWELLED CROSS

A HAIDA SHAMAN’S RATTLE

FRANCIS CRICK’S SKETCH OF DNA

TABLET K.143, SCHOOL EXERCISE BOOK OF ASHURBANIPAL, KING OF ASSYRIA

VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S BUTTERFLY GENITALIA CABINET

CHARLES DICKENS’S FELINE LETTER OPENER

THE HEART TOKEN

ITEM RDMSC RD 1/1/1

AUGUSTE PICCARD’S BALLOON GONDOLA

JASON JUNIOR

UNDERWATER PAINTING BY ZARH PRITCHARD

ANGLERFISH COUPLE

THE FIRST GIRAFFE IN FRANCE

A GREAT AUK EGG

A GLASS JELLYFISH

THE INTERIOR OF VASA

FLAG FROM THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR

A BLUE WHALE

LOGBOOK OF THE KON-TIKI EXPEDITION

WALLY HERBERT’S SLEDGE

SONG 21

EXU BOCA DE FOGO

LIVINGSTONE AND STANLEY’S HATS

HAWAI’IAN FEATHER HELMET

THE LIENZO OF TLAPILTEPEC

MIXTEC TURQUOISE MOSAIC SHIELD

ALICIA (1965–67) MURAL BY JOAN MIRÓ AND JOSEP LLORÉNS ARTIGAS

AN UNOPENED BOOK

THE DIAMOND SUTRA

TIBETAN ABBOT’S COSTUME

TWO GOLDEN BEES, FROM THE GLASS PALACE IN BURMA

SLAP-SOLED SHOES

BLOOD’S DAGGER

TELL HALAF SCULPTURES

ALFRED NOBEL’S WILL

SKETCHES OF CHURCHILL

FRIENDSHIP BOOK

TORAH ARK CURTAIN

THE TOWER OF THE BLUE HORSES BY FRANZ MARC

CHRISTMAS TELEGRAM FROM AGENT ZIGZAG

A CHANNEL ISLANDS PILLAR BOX

BUCKINGHAM PALACE SWITCHBOARD

A LEAF OF GOAT EYE STAMPS

THE TOOLS THAT BELONGED TO QUEEN VICTORIA’S DENTIST

SKULL OF A TAPUIASAURUS MACEDOI

HANDAXE FROM HOXEN

A SERIES OF PAINTINGS BY OZIAS

THE SPAULDING COLLECTION OF JAPANESE PRINTS

VAN GOGH’S SKETCHBOOKS

BOX IN A VALISE BY MARCEL DUCHAMP

MARGARET FONTEYN’S TUTU

STANLEY PEACH’S CENTRE COURT DESIGNS

ORIGINAL DRAFT OF ‘AULD LANG SYNE’, ROBERT BURNS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PICTURE CREDITS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER


SINCE 2002 I HAVE BEEN a writer and researcher for the television show QI. I also co-write a weekly QI column in the Saturday Telegraph and research a Radio 4 programme called The Museum of Curiosity. One of the things I’m often asked about QI is ‘How do you find the script questions?’ My answer is that I find a lot of ideas in museums – they’re a great place to go to learn, to get fresh ideas and to wander around in beauty. I used to visit the public areas, notebook in hand, scribbling down question ideas without realizing that, behind closed doors, most of each museum’s collection is hidden away from public view.

That changed when two fish curators from the Natural History Museum invited me to look around their fishy realm. I went excitedly, thinking it would be fun but really with no idea of quite how surprising and wonderful the behind-the-scenes fish collection would be. We spent three hours pushing open high-security doors and peering into tanks to marvel at specimens like Archie, the giant squid (and his tank mate, the even bigger colossal squid), who is too big to fit in the galleries, and sharks that inspired super-fast Olympic swimwear.

The curators showed me their favourite specimens that live among shelves of glass jars containing fish from every country on Earth. One of those specimens, an anglerfish couple, made it into the pages of this book. The endless shelves full of fish have been collected over the course of a century: Darwin’s collection from the Beagle is on a shelf not far from some rare fish from Borneo that the current curators had picked up on a fishing trip earlier that month. The space was zinging with possibility and stories, and I caught the bug for backstage.

As I emerged into the light of the museum itself, the seed of the idea for a book landed lightly upon me. I began to wonder if all museums were like this – housing things that only researchers and curators know about? A few days passed, the seed began to unfurl its roots and I decided to call a few more museums to ask them whether they had any treasures behind the scenes that they rarely display. It turned out that they did. The Science Museum told me about a huge ex-RAF airbase in Wiltshire, filled with enormous objects they don’t have space to display. The Foundling Museum has a collection of tokens left by the mothers of foundlings, hidden away in an archive. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam cares for van Gogh’s sketchbooks, which they have never exhibited. Writing this a year later, looking back, it seems funny that I had to ask the museums the question. Of course, almost all museums have a storage collection filled with objects that are an integral part of the collection but are rarely put out for exhibition.

Usually there is more hidden away than there is on display. There are all sorts of reasons why. As the seed of my idea grew into a seedling, I began to unearth some of these reasons. Sometimes, objects are too precious to exhibit and for their own security need to be kept securely in a vault. This was the case with a bejewelled cross that lives in a museum in Brazil, in a dangerous part of Salvador de Bahia. Very often the treasures are too fragile to show, so it is best to keep them in a climate-controlled, dark environment because lengthy exposure to light would destroy them. At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice I saw a piece by Duchamp in ‘the bunker’ that is very rarely put out in the light of the galleries and lives with other fragile treasures, protected by covers which the museum nicknames ‘pyjamas’.

Sometimes it’s a question of size – there isn’t space for enormous objects in a museum and it’s impossible to effectively display tiny, microscopic specimens. It’s also a matter of not having enough space – there isn’t room to show everything. Natural History museums keep between 90 and 99 per cent of their specimens – a vast array of species collected over centuries across the Earth – as reserve collections, behind closed doors, ready for researchers, conservation groups or climate change specialists to delve into. Like the fish collection at the Natural History Museum, this is where the action happens.

No matter what the subject of the museum or why each object is in a reserve collection, everything that isn’t on display is valued in its own right and conserved for the future. Usually you can see anything you would like to, if you ask the museum to see it but, if you’re at all like me, perhaps you didn’t know that all of these treasures were there. Once I realized quite how much lay unexplored away from the public space of each museum I felt compelled to take some of these treasures that lurk in cupboards, basements and vaults and lift them into the light and onto the pages of this book.

The seedling of this book was fed and watered with the help of curators and conservators at each museum: keepers of the keys to the hidden realms. Each time a door was unlocked and a curator ushered me into the collection they knew so well I found myself in a world of stories, lucky enough to be with the one person on Earth who could best explain the significance of the objects that surrounded us.

I picked things intuitively, selecting those I liked or those that provoked an emotional reaction in me. Sometimes curators suggested precious things in storage that they would rarely display, other times the curator and I roamed freely around the storage areas until I found something that looked interesting, and the curator and I would then research the item’s history. If you were to write this book you would no doubt pick totally different treasures, but these are some of the things I discovered that I think are wonderful.

Whatever you’re into, there ought to be something here for you: take your pick – what about a spacesuit covered in moon dust? Or maybe three pieces of Mars, kept in storage at the Vatican Observatory? A letter opener made from the paw of Charles Dickens’s cat? A friendship book written in by Anne Frank? Perhaps a tutu danced in by Margot Fonteyn?

Delve in and have a look around. I hope you will find ideas, people, stories and treasures that will fascinate and inspire you.


IF THE MUSES LOOK FOR heaven here on Earth, I think they must find it in museums. Originally more like libraries, museums were conceived as ‘shrines for the muses’, filled with books. It was only in the seventeenth century that they became showpieces for wonderful objects. The Morgan Library and Museum is a museum in all senses of the word: a library, as the first museums were, a treasure chest of artefacts, as museums are today, and a gift to the muses.

The Morgan is in the former home of Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), one of the most brilliant financiers America has ever seen and a generous and devoted patron of the arts. Each day, hundreds of people wander around Pierpont’s sumptuous library, built for $1.2 million, with a mantelpiece and ceiling sourced from Rome. They marvel at the books and artwork on show in his home and his library, which his banking colleagues dubbed ‘The Up-town Branch’.

Only a fragment of the work at the Morgan is on display. Most of their treasures are beneath the buzzing city of New York, resting in three floors of quiet, humidity-controlled rooms carved out of the rock. The long rooms are filled with grey, steel-enclosed safes, each one fiercely protective of its delicate contents: ideas that shaped the history of human feeling and thinking, touchstones of our culture.

Few people know they are there, waiting, deep in the calm, beneath Manhattan, but I imagine the muses love to flit around there, exulting in the hidden treasures: the only manuscript of Paradise Lost, dictated by the blind poet Milton, notebooks containing lyrics by Bob Dylan (the first moment ‘Blowing in the Wind’ came to Dylan is scribbled in pencil), neat scores by Mozart and Debussy and messy scores by Beethoven, drawings by Dürer and Picasso and hundreds of ideas produced by some of the most creative people that have ever lived. The muses laugh gleefully, for they have been listened to. The archives of the Morgan are proof that we humans can sometimes hear the quiet calls of the gods of art and find the skill to translate this calling into physical form.

Only the curators of the Morgan go down to the archives. They swap things in and out of display and bring items requested by people who want to see them up to the beautiful Morgan reading room. I came into the reading room to view a Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever printed in the western world. The Morgan owns three copies, more than any other institution in the world. There are only 50 or so copies in existence, and only 12 of those are on vellum. I had a morning to myself with the Morgan’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible on vellum.

Inge Dupont, one of the librarians, brought it up out of the vaults of the Morgan and there it was, in two enormous volumes – Old and New Testament. It was sitting on a trolley, which Inge and her colleague wheeled across the reading room to a desk. Together, they heaved the New Testament up on to a lectern. They handed me a piece of acid-free card with which to turn the pages and asked me to turn them holding the bottom right-hand pages only. Then they left me alone with one of the most valuable books in the world. It was sublime. I felt so lucky. I’d seen a copy on paper in the New York Public Library, but it was behind glass. This civilization-changing beauty was here in my hands.

I stood up to read it. Gutenberg created the Bibles so they could be read in monastery refectories, by lots of monks at the same time, so they tend to be enormous. This one was huge, and the vellum pages were stiff to turn, so I had to be standing above the Bible to turn a page. Standing up also seemed appropriate. When the first Gutenberg Bible to come to the United States arrived in New York, the officers at the Customs House were asked to remove their hats on seeing it, for the privilege of viewing a Gutenberg Bible is available to so few.

As I turned the pages, I was in a vortex, transported to Johannes Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz, Germany, in 1454; to a room in which Gutenberg paced up and down, watched by his investors, helped by his assistants, combining ink and calf’s leather and his new invention, a printing press which held 270 type moulds of letters, to create 180 Bibles, which would begin a revolution in the way we receive and spread information.

Gutenberg worked hard. In fact, I have reason to believe he slept in his workshop, or at least came to work in the clothes he slept in at home. When I visited Harvard’s Natural History Museum’s entomology collection, their curator showed me an ant collected and preserved in vodka at a dinner party hosted by Stalin. When I asked him if he had a favourite item in his collection, he said there was one creature he wished he still had – Gutenberg’s bedbug. He told me how the phone had rung one day and it was the Boston Library, who said, ‘We’ve found a creature in our Gutenberg Bible, can you check it out for us?’ They sent the creature over so the curator could have a good look. He called them back later that day to say, ‘You’ve got a bedbug belonging to Mr Gutenberg.’ He gave the bug back to the library and never saw it again.

Even if Gutenberg did lose a lot of sleep while creating movable type and his Bibles, it was certainly worth it. He invented a new way of communicating, transformed the rate of literacy throughout the western world and started a revolution that remained unprecedented in human culture until the arrival of the internet in our lifetime. Before Gutenberg, the only way to create a book was by hand. In the west, this was the job of monks, who worked in scriptoriums in chilly monasteries. They probably had inky hands, sore backs and, by the end of each day, rather tired eyes. Yet they laboured on, spreading the good word. In the east, a Chinese blacksmith, Pi Sheng, had invented movable type four centuries earlier, but his invention hadn’t been adapted for use by a machine. In China, type was imprinted on the page by hand rubbing, which made the process only slightly more efficient than the copying by a medieval scribe.

When Gutenberg put all the ingredients together, crucially, with the invention of his type mould, and began printing his Bibles, a lot of scribes soon found themselves out of a job. Now, a book could be created more quickly, by machine. This machine could, amazingly at the time, create as many identical copies of the same text as you needed. Suddenly, anyone lucky enough to own a Gutenberg Bible, no matter where they were in the world, could turn to page 20 and read from the same text.

Just imagine the work that went into this one book. For years, Gutenberg toiled in secret in a little hamlet downriver from Strasbourg. He couldn’t risk anyone finding out the techniques he was developing. He shaped each of the 200 or so letters he needed for a Bible out of metal, by hand. Then, using the type mould, he made copies of the letters. They were set into a form, covered with ink made in his workshop and pressed, using a machine he may well have adapted from a wine press, on to either vellum, as with this Bible, or paper. Vellum – calfskin – is more precious than paper, which itself was worth almost as much gold. Gutenberg wanted all his Bibles to be printed on vellum, but it was just too expensive.

The ink shimmers, because it contains metal compounds. It’s set off beautifully by its decoration in rich golds, blues, greens and reds. As soon as a page of the Bible was printed, it was handed over to an illustrator in Gutenberg’s home town who illustrated the initials, and then to another in Bruges who completed the intricate decoration of the Bible’s columns and borders. When the book was complete, it was bound. It came out of the workshop and changed the world. In just 50 years, the number of books printed with movable type went from zero to 20 million.

When, nearly five centuries later, Morgan bought the manuscript of Pudd’nhead Wilson from Mark Twain, the author told Morgan, ‘One of my highest ambitions is gratified – which was to have something of mine placed elbow to elbow with that august company which you have gathered together to remain indestructible in a perishable world.’ This is why the Morgan Library and Museum is so special. The ‘august company’ really is wonderful and each precious work is safe in the quiet vaults below Manhattan. No wonder the muses love this place so much.


[Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913)] Pierpont Morgan was a brilliant financier and an avid collector of rare and precious things. His son J. P. Morgan, Jr gave his father’s extraordinary library to the public in 1924, and now anyone who visits can see a selection of his art, rare books, manuscripts, drawings, prints and ancient artefacts that are on display.


[Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (1398–1468)] Gutenberg invented movable type and so introduced printing to Europe.


[The Morgan Library’s Gutenberg Bible on vellum] I had an afternoon alone with this world treasure, in the reading room of the Morgan Library and Museum.


I ALMOST FORGOT TO LOOK at the moon today.

Those are the words on the first painting I ever chose for myself. I saw it in a little arty café in Cochin, Kerala, India. At the other end of the subcontinent, in Nepal, people think the dead live on the moon. Visiting Apollo astronauts have been asked, ‘When you were on the moon, did you happen to see my auntie?’

Since my trip to the storage facility of the National Air and Space Museum, when I look at the moon I see hundreds of spacesuits, lying quietly in the cold, and two knees, thickly coated in moon dust.

When I visited the museum, the spacesuit storage facility was located, rather appropriately, in Suitland, Maryland. To get there, I took a Metro from central Washington DC and then walked along a highway, melting in the summer heatwave and being hooted at by people who were probably wondering what on earth I was doing there. Eventually, I arrived and was greeted by the museum collection conservator, Lisa Young, and curator, Cathleen Lewis. They opened a spacey, silver door, walked us into a middle room, like an airlock, and then into a room filled with spacesuits in stasis.

It’s a cold (18°C/65°F), narrow room lined with hundreds of headless bodies on metal bunk beds. Each body is covered with a sheet, as if it were a morgue for spacesuits (only these suits are not ‘dead’, they’re being preserved for future generations). In total, there are 287 suits in the collection, but only a little more than half of these are in storage at any time. The others are on display or on loan to other museums around the world. Each one is referred to by the name of the astronaut who wore it, and each is displayed on a mannequin and laid out flat on its back on the metal bunk beds, five to six bunks high. We pulled back a sheet and uncovered a body.

It was the spacesuit of Harrison H. ‘Jack’ Schmitt of Apollo 17, the only scientist to walk on the moon. His spacesuit is covered in grey dust, especially the knees. It looks like ash, but it is moon dust. The moon dust is the reason why this suit is not on display. Schmitt is a geologist. When the Apollo astronauts were in training, they went partying together. Schmitt would sit there among the pilots, talking about rocks. He was chosen for Apollo 17, the final manned mission to the moon, because scientists at NASA were going bananas. They couldn’t believe that, of the 12 men who had walked on the moon, not one was a scientist.

There had been some lighthearted scientific experiments – playing golf, dropping a feather and hammer at the same time to see which would fall first (they fell at the same time), and some lunar samples had been brought back to Earth, but no one who could make snap scientific decisions on the moon had ever been up there. As a geologist, Schmitt could do, in another world, what he did all the time on the Earth – dig to find out more about what the planet was made of. The scientists at NASA insisted that Schmitt was given a seat.

Hours into the return trip, the crew of Apollo 17 took one of the most famous photographs of all time, a photograph of our planet called ‘The Blue Marble’, of the whole Earth lit up by the sun. Africa was in daylight, and Antarctica was lit by the December solstice. Although NASA credits the whole crew with taking the photograph, as they were all using the camera, passing it between them, it’s acknowledged now that the iconic image was the work of Schmitt.

Much later, he and Gene Cernan left Ronald Evans behind in the command module and landed the lunar module in the Taurus-Littrow valley of the moon. It was December 1972. They stayed on the moon for three days, driving 16 kilometres across the light side. They saw lunar plains, took measurements of the gravitational field of the moon, passed steep mountains, drove around small craters and stood beside enormous boulders and glittering rocks.

Whenever they saw interesting things they jumped out to gather treasures to take home. They were ecstatic, especially Schmitt. He began singing, ‘I was strolling on the moon one day,’ skipping, bouncing and humming happily on his way. Gene Cernan, not a geologist, sung along too.

In total, they brought back 109 kilograms of rock. One of these samples is named Troctolite 76535. It formed when the moon was only 300 million years old and it has a faint magnetic field, suggesting that the moon itself may once have had one. Troctolite rock is found on Earth in several places, including Cornwall, the Isle of Rum in Scotland and western Australia. Schmitt also collected orange soil, which suggested the possibility of water, and maybe even life, at some point in the moon’s history.

In his travels across the moon, a quarter of a million miles from Earth, Schmitt fell over or made contact with the moon more often than any other Apollo astronaut. His suit got very dirty as he crawled along collecting rocks, or from when he fell over and pushed himself upright again. Most of the Apollo spacesuits were dry-cleaned when they arrived back to Earth, but Schmitt’s never was. NASA wanted to preserve the final Apollo mission spacesuits just as they were. So dust from the lunar surface remains embedded in the fibre. I peered at the knees of his spacesuit. They were thick with grey lunar soil. I really got to look at the moon that day.

Apollo 17 was the flight when the astronauts were on the surface of the moon for the longest period of time, travelled furthest across it and collected the most lunar samples. This suit is just as it was when Schmitt, one of the last two men on the moon, left its surface, splashed back into the Pacific Ocean, took the spacesuit off and put his Earth clothes back on. It’s too precious to be displayed in the museum.

The people who have seen this spacesuit are the collections staff of the museum, scientists, researchers and the Apollo astronauts who come to see their suits, often with their grandchildren (Alan Bean, Apollo 12, is the astronaut who visits his suit most often), and NASA engineers. NASA’s design team is working on suits for Mars. The Mars suits will need to last longer and be able to be taken on and off more than the Apollo suits, but they’re a good place to start. Schmitt’s suit is especially useful in aiding with their design, as he tested it to the max, bounding about with rocks in his hand. They’ve looked inside using x-radiography and studied in detail the lunar soil that clings to it.

After marvelling at Schmitt’s suit, I looked around the room. On the bunk adjacent to it I saw a boot sticking out from beneath its sheet. It had a circular patch of Velcro on the sole. ‘What’s that?’ I asked the curators, pointing at the boot. ‘Oh, that’s Neil Armstrong,’ they said. This Velcro-soled boot was covered with an additional lunar boot when it stepped on to the moon but, still, it had covered the foot of Neil Armstrong when he took his ‘one giant step for mankind’.

Only Schmitt and Cernan’s lunar boots are back on Earth: they’re here in the museum collection as two of the most complete flown suits that made it back. The boots Neil wore inside the spaceship had Velcro on the soles so that he could stand still. The interior of the ship had Velcro laid down like a carpet so that, whenever the astronauts needed to be rooted in one place, they could stick themselves on to the ship. Presumably, they walked around making loud, ripping noises.

Neil Armstrong’s suit and under boots have been in storage for five years, having conservation work done on them. They won’t always be behind the scenes and the same goes for a lot of the suits. They’re here resting, between exhibitions, ‘in shavasana position’, as Lisa put it (that’s the yoga position where you lie on your back, meditating). It may be years before these suits are put on display, but it is possible to display them.

Schmitt’s will need to wait decades, at least, until it can come out of storage. Museums have not yet found a way to display it without damage to the suit and its precious moon dust.

Since I saw the suits, they have been on the move. They now live in their new storage facility, in Chantilly, Virginia. The new facility is part of the Air and Space museum’s sister museum, built near the airport, so that new air and space exhibits can be flown straight into the museum collection. The suits were moved in trucks, a few each day, snuggled into crates to keep them safe. The collections staff considered moving them in coffins but decided against it. In their new home, the suits are stored according to mission.

Now that I have seen the suits they wore, how fragile they are, considering they kept men alive on the moon, and now that I have seen lunar soil, on dusty knees 2 centimetres from my nose, the moon landings feel much more immediate. I wasn’t alive when mankind landed on the moon, so I missed the excitement that everyone who was must have felt listening to their radios, watching TV all over Earth and then gazing up at the white thing in the sky and imagining humans there in space. Now I know it wasn’t a hoax (unless of course the sheets we didn’t pull back actually covered Mickey Mouse suits …).

The moon landings also seem more surreal. The suits are made out of fibreglass fabric, a material that was first manufactured for household items. Cathy remembers that her ’parents had fibreglass curtains, the height of fashion in the sixties’. The suits seem far less robust than I had imagined. They have holes where the breathing apparatus was screwed on. They look so normal that they seem strange. They’re very low-tech, very human.

Seeing the suits has made me feel that something greater than NASA and Nixon must have been at work to get those men up there, keep them safe and bring them home. I’ve read that there was only a ten per cent chance the astronauts would make it back alive. Now, when I look at the moon and think of those fragile suits lying in shavasana, it feels to me as if the moon wanted to meet mankind. Maybe Mars will be next.


[Spacesuits] The spacesuits are dressed on mannequins and are laid out flat on their backs on metal bunk beds five to six bunks high.


[Planet Earth] ‘It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small,’(Neil Armstrong)


[Schmitt on the moon] Schmitt checks out a lunar boulder on the moon. You can see the lunar rover to the right of the photo.


[Harrison Schmitt’s Spacesuit] Schmitt’s suit is too precious to put on display; it is covered in grey moon dust. I also saw Neil Armstrong’s suit, gloves and boots.


[Apollo 17 moon landing] Schmitt stands by the flag on the moon. You can see Earth in the black sky above.


BROTHER GUY CONSOLMAGNO IS THE curator of the Vatican Observatory. The observatory used to be in Rome, but moved out to the Pope’s summer home, Castel Gandolfo, in Albano, just outside Rome, when light pollution in the city made it impossible to see the stars.

I took a train from Rome to Albano. When I arrived, Brother Guy was waiting on the platform. I had thought he might be in monk’s robes, but he was wearing a red waterproof jacket, jeans and trainers. That is because he is a Jesuit and his order don’t wear robes, they prefer to blend in and work among lay people. He was immediately friendly, bright and charming and I knew it would be a fun day.

We walked up through the sleepy town until we reached the main square. It was quiet but for the sounds of birds and a few people chatting in restaurants. On one side of the square is a pink wall which divides the town from the papal grounds. Built into this wall is a door with a sign beside it carved into stone that reads ‘Specola Vaticana’. We opened the door and entered the Papal Grounds and the observatory’s museum. Guy explained that the Pope’s house is 2 kilometres away from the museum, across orchards and fields.

The observatory isn’t often open to the public. More often than not, the curators and astronomers have the place to themselves. However, the day I visited they were preparing for the arrival of 500 diplomats from around the world the following week and there were several people painting walls and polishing clocks in anticipation.

Guy showed me a film he was putting together for their visit. It tells the history of the observatory, one of the oldest astronomical institutions in the world. It was founded in 1582 when the Church replaced the Roman, or Julian, calendar with the Gregorian (which introduced the idea of having a leap year every four years to eliminate the discrepancies in time that had built up over the centuries). At first, the observatory’s telescopes pointed out at the universe from inside the Vatican itself, from a room called the Tower of the Winds.

The telescopes were brought to Albano in 1935. Guy has worked here for years. ‘It’s much better out here, the security isn’t so tight,’ he jokes. He spends half of his year here, researching, writing and teaching astronomy students. The other half of the year Guy spends in the desert, at the second Vatican Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. This is the home of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, a very high-spec model with an internal mirror designed by a man called Roger Angel. ‘Yes, the Pope’s telescope was designed by an Angel,’ said Guy. ‘It is used for exploring new areas of the universe. I use it for looking at the colours of faint comet-like objects out beyond Neptune. These are the things that Pluto was part of before we realized that Pluto is not a planet but part of the vast band of Trans-Neptunian objects.’ He works there with a team of 14 others.

Back in Albano, Brother Guy works with another team to look after the observatory. He ushered me into the vast library of 20,000 books and journals. His favourite book is by a fellow Jesuit brother, Father Angelo Secchi (1818–78) and is called Sistema Solare, written in 1859. ‘It is the first book I’ve found that talks about the planets as real places you could walk around and have adventures on. Secchi takes facts and then uses his imagination to bring it all together. This book started planetary science. Before then, astronomers were far more interested in stars. Suddenly the planets became “places” rather than dots in the sky. They became things, not light.’

Guy showed me the Mars chapter of the book and pointed out where Secchi describes Mars as having canali (Italian for ‘channels’) on its surface. Some people thought, incorrectly, that Secchi was describing canals, like the ones on Earth, which did much to encourage the idea that there was life on Mars.

Outside the library is Brother Guy’s domain: the museum and its collection of space-related artefacts. There are different meteorites that flew around in space for around 15 million years until landing on our planet. Brother Guy explained that ‘10,000 pieces of rock fall to the Earth each year, but we humans collect about five of them, if we’re lucky. Most land in the ocean, or are lost because they look like ordinary rocks.’

There are also three pieces of Mars. Each piece of Mars rock is from a different part of the planet. How do we know they are from Mars? Firstly, because other meteorites contain metals and Mars rocks do not. Secondly, they are a billion years old, which is young, compared to the 4,568 billion-year ages of the other meteorites. And, thirdly, bubbles of gas trapped inside them have been tested using a mass spectrometer, and it turns out that they exactly match the atmosphere of Mars, as recorded by the Mars Rover.

The Vatican also has a globe of Mars, showing the channels on the planet, and a globe of the moon, the first ever made by NASA, given to the Vatican as a gift.

I asked Brother Guy if he had a favourite treasure in the collection. He said that it changed all the time; he loves the Mars rocks, but his favourite meteorite that day was Allende. There are two tons of it in the world and it revolutionized science. ‘It fell in 1969, just before the moon landing. NASA had been buying all sorts of toys with which to measure moon rocks, which they hoped the astronauts would bring back to Earth. So they were able to test their toys on Allende. They discovered that the little white bits inside the meteorite were dust from stars that existed even before the planets were formed. This changed the way NASA thought about the solar system; they had known it was about 4.6 billion years old but, thanks to Allende, they could measure the age more precisely, to 4.568 billion’.

Brother Guy got even more cosmic. ‘It’s strange to think that we humans – who are all made of stardust – look up at the sky to study galaxies, without often reflecting on the fact that what we’re actually studying is light. The things we’re looking at are no longer really there.’ That is one reason why he likes working in the meteorite lab, among the ‘real stuff’, which he can pick up and measure.

We decided to visit his lab, but to have a drink first. Over a delicious coffee, which Brother Guy served in ‘Specola Vaticana’ cups, he told me how he had ended up as curator of meteorites at the Vatican. He grew up in Detroit. He loved space and saved up 16 books of stamps to swap for his first telescope. He joined the Jesuit order and it was they who decided that this was the job for him. He says he would have been just as happy serving soup, if that is what the Jesuits had decided, but he is surely the perfect man for the job here at the Vatican.

Inside his lab, one surface is covered with microscopes and one weird instrument that looks like a saucepan, used to suck water off meteorites. The rest of the room is full of cupboards filled with drawers containing slices of meteorite. Propped up on a cupboard is a painting of the planets, each one studded with jewels. No one really knows who made it or how it ended up in in the lab, but it’s beautiful.

Brother Guy popped a 4.6-billion-year old meteorite into my hand. This was the oldest in the collection and was found in France in 1810. Lots of locals saw it fall from the sky and then had to convince sceptical scientists that it was space rock. It has a handwritten label attached to it telling how it fell to earth in L’Aigle.

On the wall is a photograph of the current Pope looking into a microscope at a section of meteorite. Brother Guy showed him two; one found near his hometown in southern Germany; the other one in the Ukraine in 1866. Brother Guy showed me the second slice. He took it out of its drawer and slid it under a microscope that shone polarized light. ‘It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope,’ I said. Brother Guy turned the slide in circles, and bright colours shifted into new patterns. It was bizarre that so many shapes could appear from something that looked so bland and tiny on the slide. ‘All the meteorites do this under polarized light,’ Brother Guy added, ‘but this is the prettiest of them all.’

Brother Guy made a Christmas card out of an image of the meteorite I was looking at, because he thinks a pattern within it looks like Jesus in a manger. He gave me one of the cards. On the back, it says, ‘The meteorite samples formed in the proto-solar nebula around our sun, 4.56 billion years ago.’

This card is not your average Christmas card, and not one you’d expect to get from the Vatican, at least, not unless you know about Brother Guy and the two Vatican observatories.


[Mars canals] Secchi drew some of the first colour illustrations of Mars and referred to the canali, the Italian word for channels, on the surface of the planet. Some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century astronomers thought ‘canali’ meant ‘canals’ and used them as evidence that there was life on Mars.


[Three pieces of Mars] The Vatican Observatory owns three pieces of Mars rock, each one from a different part of the planet.


[Brother Guy J. Consolmagno] Brother Guy was assigned the job of astronomer at the Vatican Observatory when he became a Jesuit. He showed me around the Vatican meteorite collection at the Pope’s summer residence.


THE ROYAL SOCIETY IN LONDON began in 1660, when a group of scientists decided it would be valuable to meet once a week and discuss experiments. Today it is one of the oldest scientific academies in the world.

Their archive is split between a salt mine in Cheshire – to access anything down there you have to go in a miner’s lift and put on a hard hat and a basement in its HQ in London.

I headed downstairs into the basement, which is stuffed with a quarter of a million manuscripts made up of the musings, publications and letters written by some of the greatest scientific minds that have ever lived.

Mixed in among the books and writings are 200 objects, including slides of a goat with the bends (used when working out dive tables), a wonderful doodle on blotting paper by top scientists and the then prime minister gathered at a meeting about the Transit of Venus in 1882, tag and a wooden potato masher made by a young Ernest Rutherford for ten his grandma. I looked a bit confused. ‘Rutherford,’ said Keith Moore, curator of the Royal Society’s library and archives, ‘split the atom.’ Rutherford is buried in Westminster Abbey, near Sir Isaac Newton.

Pretty much everyone has heard the story about how Newton first described gravity. He was sitting underneath an apple tree when an apple fell from the tree and bounced off his head. Newton wondered why. His answer? A thing he called gravity. Anyone who has looked deeper into the tale comes up against people saying it wasn’t true.

But Newton knew the value of a good anecdote and told it himself. In the Royal Society library there is a first-hand account of him describing the event to William Stukeley, author of Memoirs of Newton’s Life (1752):

After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea [sic], under the shade of some apple trees; only he, and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre?

So the apple tree really did inspire Newton, even if the apple didn’t fall on his head. The account is online on the Royal Society’s website if you want to see it.

Just as Newton had never before considered why it was that apples fall to the ground, even though I had heard the story many times before I’d never wondered which actual apple tree had inspired him. That was, until I saw several pieces of it behind the scenes at the Royal Society.

Newton’s fabled apple tree once stood in the garden of his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. In 1800, the inspirational tree blew over. Luckily, it re-rooted itself, and a new tree, an offshoot from the original, is still flourishing there today.

The owner of Woolsthorpe Manor saved some pieces of Newton’s original apple tree after it blew over. Some of them are in the Royal Society archives. On a shelf down in the cool basement are two fragments, as well as two rulers and a prism made from the wood. One of the fragments is in a little pink plastic bag, because it has just been on an adventure, up into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2010. It will remain in the pink bag, because the bag is now part of its history.

The apple wood was taken up into orbit so that it could experience zero gravity. The plan was also to drop a real apple on the space station and film whether it was subject to gravity or not. They weren’t able to do the test because an astronaut who didn’t know what they were up to – she will remain nameless – saw the apple lying around and ate it. They could hardly pop out to the shops, so they had to make do with a pear. You can watch a film of it floating.

Keith told me the pear is flying, not because it wasn’t subject to gravity, but because the space station is falling, and the pear with it, in orbit. ‘Just look at the astronauts’ hair,’ he said. It floats above their heads.

Also in the archives is a lock of Newton’s hair – perhaps with high concentrations of mercury in it, as a result of his alchemical experiments – and his death mask. ‘This is the closest you’ll get to Isaac Newton,’ said Keith.

We looked at a drawing of Newton’s apple tree, sketched by Thomas Howison in the 1820s. It is of the original tree, which lies dead on the ground, and the re-rooted tree beside it. Keith had just been having a good look at it and discovered a new secret. We peered at it (have a look yourself) and could just make out the outline of Newton sitting underneath the tree. Keith had seen the picture countless times but had only just noticed the faintly drawn figure beneath it. ‘The archives are still turning up secrets,’ he said.

On a shelf beside the pieces of apple tree sits Newton’s reflecting telescope (he donated it to the Royal Society; they lost it for a while but it turned up again in the 1730s in an instrument maker’s workshop). It has two mirrors inside, and two tubes, which you slide to focus the mirrors.

Before Newton had the brainwave of using mirrors, looking at the stars meant holding two enormous and unwieldy lenses far apart, tied together by pieces of string. Newton mounted his old, big telescope on a maypole, which he’d bought on Charing Cross Road.

He invented this small, wood and leather reflecting telescope while he lived in Cambridge. Later, he came to London and worked from a laboratory at the Tower of London, where he was Master of the Royal Mint. Imagine him peering up into space from his rooms inside the Tower.

When he made his telescope he sent his idea to the Royal Society and included a drawing. I loved looking at Newton’s sketch, complete with an eye looking down into the telescope. Then I was able to put my own eye to his telescope, just as he would have done. All I could see was the wall of the basement, but I got the idea. Amazingly, centuries later, the Hubble space telescope was built using essentially the same design.

The Royal Society owns many of the letters Newton sent over the years, explaining what he was up to. Some were expanded upon and turned into publications. The original manuscripts of these texts are here in the archive.

We looked at the original copy of the Principia (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica) that Newton sent away to be published. This first copy was written up by his secretary and has marginalia in Newton’s hand and in the writing of his friend Edmund Halley – of Halley’s Comet fame who paid for it to be published.

The Royal Society was planning to cover the costs, but the publication of A History of Fishes, by Francis Willughby and John Ray, had left them out of pocket. Samuel Pepys was the Society’s president at the time and is named on the title pages of both the Principia and A History of Fishes (his diary wasn’t published until 123 years after he died).

Willughby had been Ray’s student and the two travelled together studying and collecting birds and fish. When Willughby suddenly died, Ray saw his three books – about birds, fish and games – through the press. The twosome’s collection of birds and fish is stored at Willughby’s family home, Wollaton Hall, which, incidentally, starred as Wayne Manor in the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises.

Back in 2010, Keith had the pleasure of showing Newton’s Principia to some Apollo astronauts – Gene Cernan, Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell – when they visited the Royal Society. He really enjoyed their visit. ‘I am a child of the sixties; that is why I got into all of this,’ he told me.

As they turned the pages of the tome, Gene Cernan talked about how he had experienced Newton’s third law of motion – that every action has an equal and opposite reaction – first hand, in space. When he flew on Gemini 9, he had to assemble a backpack in zero gravity, with little light, outside the spacecraft. Nothing was holding him anywhere, so as he tightened a valve, his entire body span in the opposite direction. Everything he touched would touch him back and send him tumbling back out into space. When he touched the spacecraft, it repelled him. He had trouble getting back inside and when he finally made it his boots were filled with sweat.

From then on, NASA put hand and footholds on its space capsules so that the astronauts could anchor themselves in space. The astronauts were also trained in water so they could experience weightlessness. By the time Cernan flew to the moon with Harrison Schmitt, on Apollo 17, he knew how to get around without gravity.

When the Royal Society lent their fragment of Newton’s apple tree to NASA astronaut Piers Sellers to take up to the space station, they also sent along a picture of Sir Isaac Newton. The crew put it in the window of the space station so that Newton could look out: they thought he would have liked the view. Imagine what Newton might have come up with, if he’d had the chance to spend time up there with them, quietly looking around at the universe getting on with what it does, and figuring out how things work.


[Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727)] Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. In the garden grew a Flower of Kent apple tree connected with the tale of Newton’s discovery of the law of gravitation – a story which Newton himself started.


[Newton’s Apple Tree by Thomas Howison] If you look really closely you can see a ghostly figure of Sir Isaac Newton sitting on a branch of the fallen tree.


[Newton’s reflecting telescope] Newton sent a sketch of his Invention to the Royal Society. I saw it in their library. He included a sketch of his eye, looking down into the telescope. I was able to put my own eye to the telescope, just as he would have done centuries ago.


[Newton’s Principia] The Royal Society has the original proof copy of Newton’s masterpiece Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, down in the basement.


[Two pieces of Newton’s apple tree] A piece of the apple tree that inspired Newton was taken onto the space station, along with a photograph of Newton, below.


Imagine what Newton might have come up with, if he’d had the chance to spend time aboard the space station.


‘YOU COULD SAY THIS ENTIRE room is a hidden treasure,’ said the curator of the Linnean Society as the door swung open to their basement storage facility. She flicked the lights on to reveal a wood-panelled room lined with 1,600 books and drawers filled with 14,000 plants, 3,198 insects and 1,564 shells, which were the private collection of Carl Linnaeus, the man who named the natural world.

Carl von Linné (1707–78), who was born Carl Linnaeus, was a Swedish botanist. He standardized the system of scientifically naming plants with two Latin names, the genus (e.g. Ginkgo), followed by the species (e.g. biloba). This is called binomial nomenclature, and it is now used internationally for all plants and animals, even us humans. We are in the genus Homo and our species is sapiens, hence Homo sapiens, ‘the wise man’. Linnaeus came up with our name.

It’s a really clever system if you think about it, because anyone around the world can understand what plant or creature you are talking about. It’s essential for botanists, zoologists and museum curators caring for collections of specimens.

When a new species is discovered, scientists must explain to other scientists what it is and what it looks like. So the first thing they do is pick one member of the species as a holotype, or ‘type’, specimen. This is the example of the new species that will forever define it and is often the first example of the species found. Most of these ‘types’ are in museums around the world; thousands of them are in this room because Linnaeus gave them their scientific names.

There is not, as yet, a type for Homo sapiens. A palaeontologist named Edward Drinker Cope (1840–97) asked for the job in his will, but he turned out to have syphilis, so was struck off the list. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been proposed. Many say it ought to be Linnaeus, as he came up with the idea. His body is well preserved in the cathedral in Uppsala, Sweden, so there is a chance of this happening yet.

The specimens housed at the Linnean Society used to be in Uppsala, in Linnaeus’s home, where he lived with his family. When Linnaeus died, Joseph Banks (1747–1820) – the director of Kew Gardens and a passionate botanist – tried to buy the collection, but in the end a young student of his, James Edward Smith, bought it with money he borrowed from his father, and shipped the whole lot to London, where he founded the Linnean Society.

This is the cave of riches that I went to see. It is just inside the entrance to the Royal Academy of Arts. I met the librarian, Lynda Brooks, in the library, and we ventured downstairs to the basement, where the collection lives. She turned a key that opened a door into Linnaeus’s world.

The entire room smells like a lovely combination of old books and wood polish. The top shelves are filled with books Linnaeus wrote himself, and his reference books. The lower drawers and shelves are filled with thousands of insect, shell and plant specimens collected by him and by his ‘apostles’ – his students, who collected around the world for him. These men of science would also act as pastors, priests or doctors whilst on collecting expeditions.

We began with the plants. Linnaeus pressed each one carefully, described it and gave it a scientific name, and then stored it away. Later, these were parcelled up, so each plant is now a brown paper package tied up with green string, each one stacked upon another. We unwrapped one package and, inside, we found the type specimen for Delphinium. Two hundred and fifty years after Linnaeus named it Delphinium (after the Latin for ‘dolphin’, because of the shape its flower makes as it opens, like a dolphin leaping out of the waves), it is still a vivid blue colour because it has been kept in storage, out of the light. This is just one in his library of thousands of plants.

We also unwrapped what was for Linnaeus a very special flower, Linnaea borealis, which was named after him and became his signature flower. If ever you see a painting of him, look for the flower. He usually has it draped through his fingers. When alive, it is pink, and its delicate petals carpet the floor of woodland in Sweden. At night, the pink burns in the darkness. The type specimen in the archive has turned brown over the centuries, unlike the delphinium. Pink and red flowers lose their vibrancy more quickly than blue and yellow ones.

Scientific names aren’t just for scientists. They tell stories. Buttercups are in the Ranunculus genus. They often grow near water and ranunculus is the Late Latin word for ‘little frog’, a species also found near the water. Water lilies are in the genus Nymphaea, after the water nymphs in Greek myths. The laurel Kalmia was named by Linnaeus for his Swedish student Pehr Kalm; the black mangrove Avicennia he named for the Persian physician Avicenna. He also reused classical names: Acer (maples), Quercus (oaks). The only plant Linnaeus named after a female body part is a blue vine popularly called a ‘butterfly pea’; he gave it the genus Clitoria. If you look up your favourite plant, it is bound to have a good story hiding in its scientific name.

The same goes for animals. Some animals Linnaeus named descriptively, like the southern flying squirrel, Glaucomys volans (‘the white mouse that flies’); in others, he added things that made him smile. He named the blue whale – the largest animal that has ever lived on earth – Balaenoptera musculus. In Latin, musculus means ‘little mouse’. He named the house mouse at the same time: Mus musculus. There are no mammals in the basement room of the Linnean Society – though some do still survive in Sweden – but there are a lot of fish pressed on to paper, their skin flattened as if they were flowers, as well as corals, shells and insects.

There is also, in among them, a little box that contains pearls made by Linnaeus. They are the first artificial pearls ever cultured in a mollusc. He made the pearls by jamming a piece of limestone into a freshwater mussel, Unio pictorum (the ‘painter’s mussel’, so called because artists would use the shallow valves to mix their pigment), and holding it there so the mussel would create a pearl around it. Then he put the mussel back into the river for six years, giving the pearl time to grow.

The pearls are small and roundish, apart from one elongated brown one that looks like it went a bit wrong. One has been cut in half, so I could see the irritant he put inside it to make the mussel form the pearl. It looks like a seed in the middle of the pearl.

Linnaeus sold his secret in 1762 to a Swedish merchant called Peter Bagge who got a permit from the king to make pearls, but even though he paid 6,000 dalars (more than £93,000 today) for a monopoly on the right to make pearls, he never got around to making any. Linnaeus once said that he wished he’d become famous for creating these pearls rather than for classifying nature. After taking a good look, we put them back in their box, in their drawer, and closed it shut.

Next, we took down some books. The first was a green leatherbound book with ‘LINNAEUS’ embossed in gold letters on the front. It was his journal from a trip he made to Lapland. It is filled with his notes, in his slanting handwriting, on the people, flowers and creatures of Lapland, and wonderful – if not that competent – drawings of local life.

We turned the pages and saw his charming sketches of ploughs, fish, skis, insects, coral, local Laplanders, embroidery on Sami clothing and tents. There were drawings of how the Lapps slept, ate, dried fish and even the kinds of games they played (throwing balls and a game that looks like chess). There is a beautiful sketch of a crane fly, and an interesting one of Andromeda being threatened by a sea monster beside one of an Andromeda plant being threatened by a newt. I really liked his drawing of an owlet and one of a Sami baby wrapped up cosily.

He tells how to cure chilblains with roasted reindeer cheese, how to fix a broken pot by boiling it in milk and how to make thread from reindeer hooves. He described the singing in Lapland: ‘No Laplander can sing, but instead of singing utters a noise resembling the barking of dogs.’

The journal was published as Iter Laponicum but it was brilliant to see the real thing, written in Lapland. Linnaeus brought it back to his home in Uppsala, along with a drum and a Lapp costume. There is a painting of him wearing it holding the drum and his Linnaea borealis plant, in the library upstairs at the Linnean Society.

I’d been told that Linnaeus was the first person to grow a banana in Europe, so I asked Lynda whether there was anything banana related in the collection. She opened up a book called Musa Cliffortiana Florens Hartecampi, all about that first banana. It was grown in the garden of Linnaeus’s friend George Clifford, in Holland. Musa is the genus for banana; it was named from musz, which is the Arabic word for ‘banana’; or perhaps for the nine Greek muses themselves. Inside the book is a fold-out drawing of the fruiting banana plant. It ends with a question: ‘Will my banana grow for years?’

Lynda then showed me Linnaeus’s most famous work, Systema Naturae. Published in 1735, it’s a history of all the living things he knew about at the time, divided up according to his sexual system for classifying them. He caused a bit of a scandal at the time by suggesting plants had a sex life. There are so many names he adopted which we still use today; magnolia, clematis, digitalis, jasmine, fuchsia, salvia.

Animals are included in the Systema, written down in a table, according to the genus Linnaeus assigned to them. If there was an animal he wasn’t sure about, he put it in ‘Worms’. He put humans in the same box as apes, which he didn’t want to do, but he couldn’t see a way around it. Anything he wasn’t sure actually existed he put in a box called ‘Paradoxa’, which contains the satyr, phoenix, dragon, unicorn and pelican. He wasn’t sure he believed in pelicans, because they were supposed to feed their young on their own blood. He also named stones, fossils and minerals. This first edition copy was huge, the only one that was published in such a big format. Linnaeus used to fold it into four and carry it around with him.

There are two bookcases filled with copies of Linnaeus’s work. He had many of his own publications bound with blank pages between printed ones so that he could make his own notes as he reread his books and update them as he found new species. His handwritten ideas are all over the blank pages, mostly in Latin. This room is the only place in the world where there are so many copies of Linnaeus’s books covered in his own annotations.

The day I visited the collection, thousands of Homo sapiens were rushing straight past the doors of the Linnean Society to see the David Hockney exhibition. I saw it too. Just think of all those flowers Hockney painted all over Yorkshire, some buried under snow, others popping up into the sunlight after the winter underground, each one with a scientific name, many of them coined by Linnaeus.

The entire collection has recently been digitized and is up on the Linnaean Society’s website. Researchers around the world look things up regularly, leaving the centuries old collections undisturbed in their wood-panelled room. There is a postcard of Linnaeus in there, propped up against the books, watching over the lot.


[The world of Linnaeus] I went to see thousands of specimens and books that belonged to Linnaeus. They were brought from his home in Sweden to London, and were used to found the Linnean Society.


[Linnaea borealis] Linnaeus’s signature flower, the twinflower or Linnaea borealis, named in his honour.


[Linnaeus’s pearls] Linnaeus was the first person to culture artificial pearls in a mollusc. Some of his pearls turned out better than others.


[Andromeda] Linnaeus drew this sketch inside the journal that he wrote while in Lapland.


[Systema Naturae] The first edition of Systema Naturae had only 11 pages but Linnaeus added to the book over the years, adding new species as he discovered them. The 13th edition appeared in 1770 and was 3,000 pages long. ‘God created – Linnaeus organized.’ That was how Linnaeus summed up his lifetime achievements.


THEY ARE SEEDS, INSIDE KEW’S Millennium Seed Bank (MSB). This particular seed is Lamourouxia viscosa from Mexico and is one of millions stored there. It has a lovely honeycomb cage, so that it can float in the air and spread the range of its plant. I like the design of this seed but, really, I could have chosen any of the seeds preserved in the vaults of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, because each is unique and precious.

Seeds first appeared on Earth some 360 million years ago, and since then they have spread across all environments. They are amazingly diverse, come in all kinds of shapes and range in size from the largest seed in the world, the coco de mer palm (Lodoicea maldivica) from the Seychelles, which looks like a big, curvaceous bottom (Linnaeus called it Lodoicea callipyge, callipyge meaning ‘lovely-bummed’) to orchid seeds the size of a speck of dust.

Some seeds can remain alive in the ground for hundreds of years if need be, until the conditions are just right for them to germinate. A date palm seed estimated to be 2,000 years old was discovered in 1963 when Herod the Great’s fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea was excavated. It was planted in 2005, and now Methuselah, as the plant is called, stands over a metre high. The amazing ability that seeds have to pause in time was the inspiration behind the Millenium Seed Bank Partnership.

Wolfgang Stuppy, seed morphologist at the seed bank, showed me around. He explained that one in five species of plant on Earth is faced with extinction. In 2000, Kew began collecting seeds as life insurance for the future. They started by collecting thousands of seeds from every species of wild British flowering plant and freezing them so that, in the future, if any become extinct, we will have their seeds, here in Sussex. It will be possible to defrost them, grow them and reintroduce them to the countryside. There are about 1,400 native seed-bearing plants in the UK, and 90 per cent of them are protected here, carefully frozen for the future. Britain was the first country in the world to do this with their seeds.

The seed bank has a nursery in which it grows flowers that once adorned British meadows countrywide, such as the cuckoo flower, green field speedwell and the harebell. Slowly, the people who work there are trying to get Britain to remember its native wild beauty. Some plants that were once extinct, such as a starry aquatic herb, called starfruit, have already been reintroduced into the countryside.

The seed bank has also begun to stretch its green fingers across the world. Working with more than 50 countries worldwide, it has so far been collecting wild flowering plants that grow in the world’s dry lands. When turned into food, clothing, medicine and building materials, these flowering plants help to support 1 billion people. To date, the seed bank has saved seeds from ten per cent of the world’s wild plant species, and is adding to that number all the time. In the future, the range of seeds collected will hopefully expand to include those from the tropical rainforest, and then from all types of terrain found on the planet.

We began our trip around the seed bank in Stuppy’s office, where he showed me the seeds he particularly likes. The most beautiful, for me, are the blue seeds from the Malagasy traveller’s tree. The seeds are spread by lemurs, which are native to Madagascar. Lemurs can only see the colours blue and green, so Stuppy has a hunch that the seeds are this unique colour so that the animals can spot them and gobble them up.

We headed off down the corridor and entered a white-walled room filled with seeds. This is the drying room. When seeds first arrive at the seed bank, they are put in here. They are all still in the packing containers their countries have sent them in – plastic boxes and vials, glass jars, little freezer bags, cloth bags, paper bags, brown envelopes and packing crates. We didn’t stay long as, Stuppy explained, ‘your sinuses dry out before long’, but all newly arrived seeds stay here for at least three months.

After they have dried out, the seeds are taken next door and sieved, and subsequently put into what Stuppy calls ‘the zigzag blower’, to get rid of any fruit so that just the seed remains; these are then cleaned and x-rayed. If most of the seeds in the batch are ripe, and have no insects living inside them, they are put into containers ready to be frozen.

The actual seed bank, and the freezers that contain the collection, are underground. The entrance is through a grey door surrounded by a yellow panel set into a wall of silver. If you ever visit the public area of the seed bank, you will see a metal staircase that leads down to this door, but you can’t go down there, or through the door.

Stuppy buzzed us in. The doors reminded me a bit of the spacey ones that led into the room filled with space suits at the National Air and Space Museum’s storage unit in Suitland, outside Washington D.C. On the other side of the doors there were no space suits; instead we found ourselves in another drying room. Every seed selected for freezing is dried a final time before going into its freezer, and each seed container is numbered so that the seeds can be catalogued and found later on.

As we looked about, Stuppy was yawning rather a lot. I thought maybe he was bored by showing me around, but it turned out that his wife had just had twin boys. ‘I’ve started keeping a diary of how many times they wake me up in the night,’ he told me, ‘and last night it was eight.’

As we chatted about his twins, we looked into the freezers that lead off from this room. We couldn’t go inside, as it’s too cold in there – the staff who work there wear big jackets or fleeces. The seeds are stored at -20°C (-4°F), but a series of fans adds a wind chill factor, so it feels like -40°C (-40°F). We peered through the glass at the contents of the seed bank, stored in boxes on the grey metal shelves that line the freezers, or in drawers.

At the moment, only two freezers are filled with seeds. Freezer A contains the seeds that are taken out once a decade for testing. They are put into water and incubated to make sure that they are alive and will germinate. Freezer B’s collection contains a replica of the seeds in Freezer A, but these seeds are never touched; they stay quietly frozen for the future.

A third freezer is being filled at the moment, and this is just the beginning: there is space for many more as the seed bank increases its collection. ‘You could get 38 double decker buses in this underground vault,’ says Stuppy. Already these freezers contain the greatest concentration of plant biodiversity on the planet: 10 per cent of the world’s wild plant species. In years to come, this will diversify even more. The MSB is hoping to save 25 per cent by 2020. We went back upstairs for a look at the incubator rooms, where seeds from Freezer A are periodically grown into seedlings to make sure that the seeds being stored are still healthy. Each brightly lit incubator is kept at a different temperature: 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25°C (41, 50, 59, 68, 77°F), depending on the type of plant they are set up to incubate. We popped our heads inside one; it smelt damp and mouldy. Inside were the seeds of a plant called Cousinia platylepis, and they were germinating well.

I asked Stuppy what happens to the germinating seeds. ‘They belong to the country of origin, so they are all destroyed. The only reason for growing them is to make sure the seeds in the freezer are still alive and healthy,’ he answered. He explained that bio-piracy is a big problem, which countries want to guard against, so acquiring seeds from other countries involves lots of contracts and teams of lawyers, and part of the deal is that no germinating plants will be grown without permission having been given by the country that sent the seed.

Brazil won’t let anyone keep seeds from its country, because it doesn’t want anyone to own seeds from Brazil which might be valuable later – a wonder drug perhaps, as yet to be discovered, that grows in the Amazon. ‘What about other countries?’ I asked. ‘America doesn’t have a large national seed bank for wild species (they have many large crop seed banks, though). Svalbard, Norway, only has crops. The Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the Kunming Institute of Botany, in China, and the MSB are the two biggest seed banks for wild species in the world’, Stuppy explained.

In an ideal world, the MSB would not need to exist; instead, the plants contained in the frozen ark of seeds would be growing naturally in the wild. As it is, the MSB sees its project as a race against time. Who knows how many life-saving plants are growing on the Earth that are yet to be discovered? Imagine if one dies out before its unique properties are found? I wonder how many precious medicines are frozen in the vaults now.

We’re facing a global emergency. By the end of this century, half the world’s existing plants could be extinct. It is up to us to change. Our lives depend on plants for food, fuel, medicine, textiles, chemicals and for the oxygen we breathe. Without plants, we cannot survive, so why are we not doing more to grow what we can and to protect what we have? At least the seed bank is giving us options for the future while we sort things out. It’s a start.

Scientists at Kew are looking into the effects of climate change on plants, and are studying wild species that have traits that will be needed in crops if the Earth heats up – for example, short stems and bigger leaves; wild flowers are a miracle of adaptive design. Mainly, however, the frozen seeds are here as a life insurance for plant species and for human beings of the future.

When I left the seeds behind, I went for a wander around the gardens that surround the seed bank – the grounds of Wakehurst Place. The gorgeous landscape is a showcase for some of the frozen seeds beneath the ground, a future generation of beautiful flowering plants.


[A Mexican seed] Lamourouxia viscosa is one of millions of seeds inside the seed bank. Its honeycomb design is a perfect adaptation for catching puffs of wind.


[Entrance to the seed bank] The grey door that leads into the seed bank is surrounded by a yellow panel, set into a wall of silver. You can see it from the floor above if you visit the public area of the seed bank.


[Freezer] We couldn’t go inside the freezers where the seeds are kept as it’s too cold – the staff who work there wrap up warmly in thick fleeces or big jackets.


THE FIRST MUSEUM IN BRITAIN was The Ark, in Lambeth, London. Two gardeners, John and John Tradescant, opened it. They were father and son. The duo went on plant-hunting expeditions around the world to harvest the best of the new lands being discovered, and on their travels collected things they found interesting.

They were consumed by beauty, and gathered up bundles of flowers to fill English gardens: poppies and stocks from France; white jasmine from Catalonia; daffodils from Mount Carmel; tulip trees and a mimic passion flower from North America; as well as vegetables such as cos lettuce, plums, scarlet runner beans and possibly the first pineapple in England. In 1630, John Tradescant senior became Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens, Vines and Silkworms. When he died, his son took over the role.

The Tradescants’ other great contribution to cultural life in England was their museum. They had amassed so many treasures while seeking out colourful plants that they decided, in 1626, to open up their home, Turret House, to the public. They called it The Ark and began charging people 6d to see the things that they had found in the New World and Europe. These treasures were things few people in England had ever seen before, and The Ark was described as a place ‘where a Man might in one daye behold and collecte into one place more curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travell’. The collection included plants, a chameleon, a pelican, cheese, an ape’s head, shells, the hand of a mermaid, stones, coins, a toad-fish, birds from India – even a dodo, which at the time was not yet extinct.

My favourite thing in The Ark is Powhatan’s mantle, a coat belonging to the chief of the Native American Indian tribe that lived in Virginia when the first settlers arrived. Powhatan’s daughter was Pocahontas, and she married the leader of the English settlers, John Smith. Perhaps Tradescant senior collected it when he went there in 1637, almost certainly at the king’s request. He made three trips to Virginia and brought back all kinds of flowers, plants, shells and treasures including Tradescantia virginiania, a plant that still grows in England today.

The Tradescants had a catalogue printed, Musaeum Tradescantianum, which was the first of its kind in Britain. It listed the objects in their collection, divided into sections like ‘shell-Creatures, Insects, Mineralls, Outlandish-Fruit’, ‘Utensills, House-holdstuffe’ and ‘rare curiosities of Art’. Everything was given equal weight, even things that were made up, like mermaids and unicorns.

Powhatan’s coat was catalogued in the ‘Garments, Vestures, Habits and Ornaments’ chapter, and described as ‘Pohatan, King of Virginia’s habit, all embroidered with shells, or Roanoke’. There were other things from Virginia too – a habit of bearskin and a match-coat made of raccoon skins. Just below these in the list were ‘Henry the 8, his stirrups, hawkes hods and gloves’ and, further down, ‘Edward the Confessor’s knit gloves’.

Both the Tradescants were buried in the churchyard at St Mary at Lambeth. Today the church is the Museum of Garden History, the first museum in the world dedicated to gardening. If you visit the collection you will see the tomb in the knot garden outside the museum. It is decorated with objects from the Tradescants’ collection. Legend has it that if you dance around it 12 times as Big Ben strikes, a ghost will appear. On the tomb is a poem probably written by John Aubrey describing the Tradescants, who:

… Liv’d till they had travelled Orb and Nature through, As by their choice Collections may appear, Of what is rare in land, in sea, in air, Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut) A world of wonders in one closet shut…

Their ‘world of wonders’ passed eventually, and controversially, into the hands of Elias Ashmole, who gave it to the University of Oxford. The Tradescant Ark was opened as the Ashmolean Museum, in Broad Street, Oxford, in 1683. It was the first purpose-built public museum in the world.

There were three floors in the museum. The Ark collection was on display on the top floor, along with other natural history artefacts. The ground floor was used for lectures and teaching, and the basement was a laboratory. All the original signs above the doorways on each floor are there, explaining what each room was used for.

Today, The Ark and the Ashmolean Museum have moved across the city of Oxford, and the original Ashmolean building has been taken over by the Museum of the History of Science. When they renovated the building in 1999, they lifted the floorboards on the first floor. Beneath them were all kinds of treasures from the original museum.

When the first discovery was made, the current museum curators joined the builders in digging up these secrets. They felt like ‘floorboard archaeologists’, sifting through dust rather than the earth. They pulled out all kinds of simple things, most of them dating from the eighteenth century, rather than from the very beginning of the museum in 1683.

The ephemera they pulled out of the dust includes: the label from the key that belonged to Dr Plot, keeper of the museum; a letter from J. Chapman, who worked there; labels from portraits; a lizard; a book cover; the remains of a posy of flowers; and an unopened letter -which they aren’t going to open. I’m not sure how they can resist. I liked a small house, cut out of paper, made by someone daydreaming while at the museum, and a sketch of ‘Edward’, a keeper of the museum, with a little flower drawn beneath him.

There are things which whoever dropped them must have been upset to lose – a ring; a penknife and a child’s tooth with a hole drilled through it which had probably been tied on to a string as a keepsake. Perhaps the child’s father or mother wore it and crawled around on the floor of the museum looking for it when it fell off the string.

The most everyday things are the eighteenth-century pencil sharpenings and cherry stalks – very mundane at the time, but fascinating now. There are also lots of wax seals and coins. All of these tiny treasures that fell out of people’s pockets or off the walls, or slipped off tables, have survived by chance. They weren’t supposed to have made it into the twenty-first century, but that they did gives us a lovely feel for life in Britain’s first museum. Everything suggests a human touch. These things aren’t on display, because they’re fragile and utterly unique. They’re the only physical memories of the first museum in Britain.

Now, there are around 2,500 museums in Britain, and more than 55,000 museums in the world, each with unique collections; and most of the items in these collections are kept behind the scenes. More than 100 million people visit museums in Britain each year. I wonder what the Tradescants would have made of that? When they opened The Ark in their home in Lambeth, I bet they couldn’t have imagined the trend they were starting.


[John Tradescant the elder (c.15705–1638) and John Tradescant the younger (1608–62)] The two Tradescants, father and son, were gardeners with a shared passion for interesting plants and strange curiosities.


[Turret House, Lambeth, London] The Tradescants filled their home with so many curious treasures that they decided to charge the public to come and have a look. They called the first public museum in Britain ‘The Ark’.


[Powhatan’s mantle] A visitor to the Tradescant museum in 1638 recorded seeing ‘the robe of the King of Virginia’ and it was later catalogued as ‘Pohatan, King of Virginia’s habit, all embroidered with shells, or Roanoke’. The robe is now on display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.


[Musaeum Tradescantianum] John Tradescant junior wrote a catalogue of the collection – the first of its kind in Britain.


[Found beneath the floorboards] Museum curators felt like ‘floorboard archaeologists’ as they found pieces of history that had fallen beneath the floorboards of the original Ashmolean Museum.


I TOOK A TAXI TO the Museu de Arte Sacra to see the collection. When the taxi driver dropped me off, he said, ‘The museum is down the hill – walk down that little street. When you come out, come straight back up to this main road. Don’t hang around outside the museum, it can be dangerous.’ So, nervously, I legged it down a side street into the pretty courtyard of the museum.

Once safely inside, I met Francisco Portugal, who has been the curator of the museum for 14 years. He wanted to show me the most precious treasure they have in the collection: a glittering bejewelled cross, which lay hidden under the floor of the building for centuries as buried treasure. It hasn’t been exhibited for 40 years, as the museum is worried, now the area around the museum can be sketchy, that it might get stolen.

It is kept wrapped in a white cloth under lock and key inside a safe somewhere in the building. I didn’t see where. The curator asked his assistant to fetch it and bring it into his office for me to see. We waited there, looking out at the beautiful views of the ocean until his assistant reappeared. We stood up, and she unwrapped the treasure. It was a golden cross, decorated with precious jewels. As she placed it on the table, the sunlight streaming across the ocean and in through the curator’s office window bounced off the jewels and scattered around the room.

We gathered around to admire the cross. It’s a processional one, so would have been carried from the base. It was made in Brazil, out of precious gold and jewels. At the top is a circle of golden rays bursting out of another central circle, which looks like a smoothed crystal. The circle opens up to be a cubbyhole for Communion bread. On top of the golden rays sits a small golden cross. The piece is decorated with diamond droplets, amethysts, topaz, emeralds and rubies. Six cherubs float around its edges. You’ll just have to imagine it because there are no published photographs of this most sacred cross.

Once upon a time, the room we stood in was a monk’s bedroom. The whole museum has been shaped out of the former Convent of Saint Teresa de Avila, which was founded by the Order of Barefoot Carmelites in the mid-seventeenth century in the former capital of the colony. The monks who lived here were Portuguese. They arrived in Bahia in 1660 and built a little hospice by the sea; then, in 1685, they built a convent beside it, with a church modelled on the Church of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios (Our Lady of the Remedies), of Évora in Portugal, which dates from 1614.

The curator didn’t know exactly when the cross was made but, once it was in the monastery, the monks protected, polished and proceeded to the altar carrying it. During Communion, they would open the central crystal to take out the Communion bread with which to feed the souls of their fellow monks.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Bahia fought for independence from Portugal. The convent was taken over by Portuguese troops trying to keep Bahia for their country. The monks were forced out of the monastery, but before they fled they buried this precious cross beneath the floorboards of their home. After the monks, and then the troops, had left the convent, it fell into ruin and was left derelict for many years.

In 1958, the University of Bahia restored the convent and church and turned it into the Museum of Sacred Art, exhibiting art belonging to the church, and 500 treasures belonging to Brazilian and Portuguese museums, churches, convents and brotherhoods in Brazil. During the restoration, the cross was found in the ground. The restorers were overcome with pleasure at finding the buried treasure and carefully cleaned and polished it until it shone like new. They put it on display in the museum. However, within ten years, the area around the monastery went downhill and became rough and dangerous, so the cross was taken out of the public galleries and hidden away for safekeeping. There is still plenty to see in the museum itself: 1,500 pieces of sacred art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are displayed in the rariefied atmosphere of the monks’ quarters, with a view of the glittering sea. You can see the first fresco painted in Brazil: a lotus flower with a female figure emerging from it.

The curator also took me into the former monks’ church so I could see how light the space was, with pews of dark wood and a silver altar upon which the cross may once have stood during a service, dazzling the monks as they prayed. I thought about the monks who worshipped here carrying the bejewelled cross, opening it up during Communion and lovingly polishing it after a service. They could never have imagined where it would end up: inside a safe, locked out of sight, just in case.

As I left the museum and crossed the courtyard that leads out into the street, I remembered why the cross was tucked away and decided to follow the taxi driver’s advice. I flew up the hill to the main road and hailed a cab, made it safely into the car and was thankful to have seen the beautiful cross safe in its charming museum.


[The Museum of Sacred Art, Salvador de Bahia] The museum is inside what was once the Convent of Saint Teresa de Avila, founded by the Order of Barefoot Carmelites in the mid-seventeenth century. It’s in a beautiful location by the sea, and must have once been a peaceful place to live.


BLYTHE HOUSE IS A LISTED building, on Blythe Road, in Kensington. It began life in 1903 as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank. The post office building was the first in London to have electricity and was split in half, with men and women working on different sides, each with their own entrance. Today, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum use it as a store and archive. The Science Museum keeps its small objects here (its large objects are kept in a series of aircraft hangars, in an ex-RAF airbase in Wiltshire).

The Science Museum’s treasure trove in Blythe House includes over 100,000 objects collected in the early nineteenth century by a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a Midas touch, the devoted collector Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936).

Wellcome owned a pharmaceutical company. He made a fortune thanks to his invention of medicine in tablet form. He called them tabloids – as in a mixture of tablets and alkaloids in a small packet; this is where we get the word we use to describe small newspapers. He used his wealth to set up the Wellcome Trust, which today is one of the biggest medical charities in the world. He loved to collect medical curios and books, and had agents dotted around the globe buying up things they thought would interest him. They collected so much stuff he didn’t get around to unpacking it all before he died. All of his books are stored in the Wellcome Library, on Euston Road, London. His objects were divided up between different museums around the world; some were put on display at the Wellcome Collection, on Euston Road, London (where the library is) and a tenth of his objects was brought over to Blythe House.

A team of archivists cataloguing the collection I came to see has been working for five years and has sorted over 230,000 items. It’s likely to take them another seven years to go through the lot. No one curator has ever seen it all. I spent three hours walking in and out of rooms, pulling open drawers and looking through shelves of artefacts with Selina Hurley, assistant curator of medicine at the Science Museum.

The medical treasures are sorted into rooms by theme. Each room has its own smell: the oriental room smells like incense; and the dentistry room like the bright liquid you gargle when you sit up, at the dentist’s. All of the rooms made me feel quite uneasy as they are filled with objects created to help people who were unwell.

We opened a door that led into a room filled with Roman votive offerings – models of injured parts of the body that were offered to a god to give thanks, or to ask for a cure; all over the walls are little clay feet, arms, legs, ears and even penises. Another room contains folk charms. Selina told me, ‘Every time I come in here I stumble across something different.’ Opening a drawer, she discovers a wizened object; ‘I think that’s a dried mole. Ah, here is a frog – he doesn’t smell too bad – he was used to cure cramp and kept in a little bag. A lot of things like this work through transference. You hold something and transfer your pain into it.’ Beside it is another example of this: a dog’s tooth used as a teething charm for babies (the pain would be transferred from the baby’s tooth to the dog’s). Lots of objects are labelled ‘curious object, use unknown’.

Another room is filled with piles of forceps to assist in birth; another with large glass storage bottles from pharmacies (one was for leeches). There was a cupboard with intricate Japanese memento moris (reminders that we all will die and to seize life with both hands), and a little ivory skeleton leaning on an alarm clock. I looked at a shelf lined with tiny ivory seventeenth-century anatomical figures. They were all lying flat, and I lifted their tummies off to reveal their insides. Particularly unsettling was a shelf crammed with prosthetic limbs, including a hand with a Bible on the end, and another with a scrubbing-brush attachment.

We came across the archives of Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic, and artefacts that belonged to Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and father of germ theory. There were items used by Pasteur in his study of anthrax, and some of his earliest preparations for quinine, dating back to 1820. Pretty much anything you could think of related to the history of medicine is in one of the rooms inside the Wellcome labyrinth. If you can’t find it, maybe it is still waiting to be unpacked.

Of all the objects I saw, I liked a rattle made of cane and puffin beaks the most. It is unlike anything else in the collection, and stood out, even from its nest inside a drawer. It seemed to be filled with life and spirit. At first I had no idea what it was, so I asked Selina, and she told me it was a rattle made by the Haida people, and would have belonged to a shaman.

The Haida are the indigenous people of Haida Gwaii (‘Islands of the People’), a group of islands off the coast of Canada, which, until 2010, were known as the Queen Charlotte Islands. Their name for a shaman is ‘sGaaga’. The sGaaga is both a medical doctor and a faith healer. The Haida describe the sGaaga as people with a direct line to God. They turn to them in times of sickness and uncertainty or when they want to know the future or explain the past.

The sGaaga would have made this rattle (some time between 1890 and 1935) after collecting puffin beaks from the shore. Puffins shed their bright orange bills in winter and re-grow them come spring. Without its bill, a puffin looks funny, it has a little pointed beak instead of the rainbow splendour we’re used to seeing. Usually, they hide out at sea at this time of year, so humans rarely see them in this state.

Puffins were symbolic for the sGaaga, because the birds dive into the water and disappear into another realm; shaking a rattle made from their beaks symbolized moving to another level of existence. The beaks were tied to circles of wood representing a cosmic doorway. The rattle would have been one of a pair and used only by a shaman.

Selina told me that, in 2009, 12 Haida people came to the Wellcome Collection to look at the puffin bill rattle, as well as two other items made by their people: a pipe and a comb for brushing cloth. Both are made of a rock called argillite, found only on Graham Island in Haida Gwaii. If you see something made of argillite, it was made by the Haida, because they are the only people who use it. The 12 Haida crammed into the tiny room I saw the rattle in, within Blythe House. Selina told me, ‘Their reaction to the rattle was really mixed; the younger generation were quite happy to pick it up and play with it, but the older generation wouldn’t go anywhere near it because it has such a spiritual significance.’

I checked in with Vince Collinson, a representative of the Haida people who visited the Wellcome archive. He explained, ‘The rattle was originally used by sGaaga, which would explain our elders’ hesitancy and some of our young people’s lack of hesitancy, as there are no “old style” sGaaga left today, so they can’t understand their powers. The last person in Skidegate (a Haida community on Haida Gwaii) who was operated on by a sGaaga passed away in 2007.’

Vince told me of another dimension to their visit to England. Some museums in England have other artefacts belonging to the Haida, including some of their ancestors’ bones. The Haida Repatriation Committee is working to bring home these treasures so the souls of the ancestors can be laid to rest and the Haida nation healed. Vince explained, ‘We have a very close attachment to the land of Haida Gwaii. The water, animals, birds, those are our identity, our business card. We believe the souls of the dead don’t rest in peace if their bones are not left in their homeland.’

He told me that, following the visit in which they looked at this beautiful puffin rattle, a Haida ancestor held in the Pitt Rivers Museum for over a hundred years was repatriated and reburied in August 2010, a process initiated over ten years earlier by the Haida. ‘It was truly a momentous, historic day of healing for both the Haida and the British.’ This was not the first time ancestors had been given back to their people. Between 1992 and 2004, the remains of 460 of their ancestors were brought back to Haida Gwaii. An ‘End of Mourning’ ceremony was held on the islands in 2006, in which their souls were released to Gaahlandaay Tllgaay (Spirit Land). The Haida are hopeful that many of their belongings – and not just their ancestors’ bones will be returned to them. Nika Collinson of the Ts’aahl Eagle Clan explained how important is it that Haida treasures are restored to them. ‘As Haida treasures return home, elders come to see them … as [the elders] remember, they begin to talk, bringing the history, use and stories of these treasures out of concealment and passing this knowledge on to the next generations to learn from. Without the return of these cultural materials, so much of this knowledge would not come to the surface and subsequently would not be passed on.’

There were once tens of thousands of Haida people. When Europeans arrived on the islands, this number quickly fell to fewer than 1,000, because of introduced diseases, including measles, typhoid and smallpox. Today, there are around 5,000 Haida, around 2,000 of whom live in Haida Gwaii, with others in Prince Rupert, the lower mainland of British Columbia, Seattle and Alaska.

The Haida are known for their tall totem poles, which they call ‘monumental poles’ – or ‘gyaagang.Ngaay’ in Haida. They say the first pole carvers were inspired by and learned from a pole they saw standing out in the ocean. The monumental poles are carved from red cedarwood, and it takes a year to create each one. The totem poles were used to tell stories, to mark important events, to show status and to mock people. This still goes on. In 2007, a shaming totem pole was put up in Alaska featuring the upside-down head of the ex-CEO of the oil company Exxon. The totem pole was made to express anger over the unpaid debt the company owes for the Exxon Valdez oil spillage of 1989. In England, in Windsor Great Park, near Windsor Castle, there is a 30-metre-high totem pole made in 1958 from a 600-year-old tree felled on Haida Gwaii. It was given to the Queen to commemorate the centenary of the founding of British Columbia.

The ancient Haida lived in houses made of cedar which slept 30 or more people. They ate mussels, oysters, oolichans (a fish) and oolichan grease (fish oil). High-ranking men and women tattooed their clan crests (depicting animals, the supernatural or clan histories) on to their skin. All the Haida had a deep respect for the environment. They travelled in cedarwood canoes. If you look on the back of a Canadian $20 note, you will see an artwork called Spirit of Haida Gwaii, by Haida artist Bill Reid, which depicts a Haida chief in a canoe with many other creatures of Haida Gwaii, including the raven, the frog, the eagle and the bear.

The Haida language has no relationship to other languages – rather like Basque and the Ainu language once spoken on the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan. There are fewer than 40 remaining speakers of the language, most of them over 70 years old.

I’d like to imagine the Haida rattle finding its way back to Haida Gwaii so its people can remember the days of the sGaagas. When it is returned, I am sure the Haida will say ‘Háw’aa’ –‘thank you’.


[Louis Pasteur (1822–95)] Pasteur was a French chemist and biologist who invented pasteurization. Some of the things he used in his research are in storage in Blythe House.


[A Haida shaman’s rattle] Of all the countless medical curiosities I saw in the Wellcome storage in Blythe House, I liked this rattle made out of cane and puffin beaks the most.


[Haida Gwaii] The Haida are the indigenous people of Haida Gwaii (Islands of the People), an archipelago off the coast of Canada.


[Totem poles] The Haida are known for their totem poles, which they call monumental poles. They carve them from red cedarwood trees, and each one takes a year to make.


I saw the pencil sketch of DNA in the Wellcome Library, on Euston Road, London. The drawing belongs to the Francis Crick archive, which is made up of 2,000 paper files (or 200,000 sides of text/images) amassed by Crick during his career.

There I met Ross MacFarlane, research officer at the Wellcome Library, and he showed me a selection of its treasures.

We began with the oldest thing there, the Johnson Papyrus, a piece of a book, or scroll, from the fifth century AD. It was found in Egypt. It is the oldest surviving illustration of a herbal. What’s a herbal? It is a book with names or drawings of plants, usually with information about the plant as well – including its culinary, aromatic, medicinal or hallucinatory powers, and sometimes legends associated with it. In this case, the ancient, precious drawing is of a bluey-green comfrey plant. Below it, in Greek, is an explanation of how the plant can be used for healing. This is how herbalism developed: by trying out plants and seeing how they made you feel. By trial and error the properties and medicinal uses of different plants were discovered and passed on to others.

We also looked through a diary belonging to Robert McCormick, ship’s surgeon and natural history expert on HMS Beagle. There is no mention of Darwin in the entire diary. Ross suggested McCormick was probably rather cross that Darwin had turned out to be such a natural history know-it-all, as that wasn’t the reason for him being brought on board the Beagle. Darwin joined the expedition late in the day when Fitzroy, the captain, decided he needed someone who knew about geology to come and keep him company, someone, most importantly, who would pay his own way. Darwin fitted the bill. Although I know he wasn’t a real geology pro because I visited the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge – who own Darwin’s rock collection from the Beagle – and they showed me a diary of Sedgwick’s, in which he mentions taking Darwin on a quick expedition to give him a crash course in geology just before he set sail.

I also looked through an early guide to swimming written by a Cambridge don in Elizabethan England, and a letter written by the antiquarian Sir Hans Sloane, who collected the countless treasures that became the basis for the British Museum collection. In the letter, he talks about a door that leads from his garden into a coffee shop designed as a cabinet of rarities, where he went to chat over coffee with other local pals who were interested in new ideas and discoveries. I wondered whether he would mention chocolate, for he introduced drinking chocolate to Britain in 1687. He didn’t. But you’ve probably tasted something similar to his blend; ‘Sloane’s Milk Chocolate’ recipe eventually passed into the hands of Cadbury’s.

Then I came to a white file filled with photographs, scientific papers, personal letters and musings. Ross pulled out the sketch. I instantly recognized the spiralling ladder that carries the Earth’s variety of life forms. The image was sketched in 1953, 84 years after Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA in 1869.

Miescher found out about DNA – which he called nuclein – when, doing a grim-sounding experiment on cell-digesting, he extracted some enzymes from a pig he had bought at a butcher’s and some cells from bandages used by a soldier during the Prussian War, which was going on at the time. He suggested that nuclein might be involved in heredity, but then discounted his own idea, saying it wasn’t possible that one single molecule could account for all the variation seen within species. He thought that would be far too simple.

So Francis Crick and James Watson, helped by the work of Rosalind Franklin, didn’t discover DNA, but they did work out what it looked like. They struggled to conceptualize the exact shape of the molecule for years, and were helped enormously by Rosalind Franklin’s skill as an x-ray crystallographer.

Franklin had spent four years researching crystals in Paris before moving back to London to work on investigating the structure of DNA. She was given jam jars full of gooey DNA and began to take x-ray photographs of it.

Meanwhile in Cambridge, Crick and Watson made a homemade metal model of DNA as a way to represent, in reality, the ideas they were carrying around in their heads. They had several false starts. They made a triple helix in 1951 and invited Franklin to see it, and she pointed out the molecule as they had made it would never hold together. In 1953, after seeing a photograph taken by Franklin, their ideas fell into place. Finally, they got the model right, and made their physical double helix. This sketch was made around the same time: it was part of the process of grappling with exactly what the DNA molecule looks like. When finally the image became crystal clear in their minds, the scientists were ecstatic. Crick said, ‘It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.’

Crick and Watson published their realization in the 25 April 1953 edition of Nature. The order of the names on the paper (Watson and Crick) was decided by the flip of a coin. The pair went on to win the Nobel Prize for their discovery, along with Dr Maurice Wilkins; Franklin, who had been pivotal to the research, died before the prize was awarded. Hopefully she would also have been honoured with the prize, had she been alive to receive it, for it would not have happened in the same way without her.

Now we know that a DNA molecule looks like the image in the sketch: a double helix. Every living creature on earth is made up of right-handed spiral shapes like this. The sketch, according to experts at the Wellcome Collection shows a few key features of the molecule. It is right-handed, it has two strands running in opposite directions, and the building blocks of the strands (nucleotides) have one part that forms the backbone of the molecule and another (the base) that sticks out into the middle of the helix to join with a base on the opposite strand. This joining of two bases is essential in order for DNA to pass on genetic information from one generation to the next. That’s quite a lot of information, crucial to our existence on Earth, in one pencil sketch, don’t you think?

There are at least 50 million cells in your body, and each one contains nearly 2 metres of DNA. Extracting your own is quite easy. If you’re the kind of geek who wants to try, follow these steps:

1. Swish salt-water around your cheeks.

2. Spit it into a glass containing water and washing-up liquid.

3. Mix for a minute or so.

4. Pour some ice-cold vodka, slowly, into the glass.

5. In a couple of minutes, you will see some white strands form. These are strands of DNA. If you were able to look closely at them, you’d see the double helix shape sketched in Crick’s drawing.

After co-winning the Nobel Prize, Crick became a household name. He was invited to all sorts of events, but he preferred to concentrate on his work, and keep to himself. In the archive is a ready-made, multi-purpose reply card from the 1960s, which reads:

Dr Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to –send an autograph –help you in your project –provide a photograph or read your manuscript –cure your disease –deliver a lecture –talk on the radio or act as chairman –appear on TV or become an editor Delete where appropriate.

Later in life, Crick moved from Cambridge to San Diego, and worked at the Salk Institute there. He lived in a house called the Golden Helix. There he began focusing on neurobiology. He wanted to look inside the human brain, to study the networks, connections and firing patterns of neurons, as he thought they held the key to understanding mental activity and consciousness.

The Wellcome Library bought Crick’s papers in 2001, while he was still alive. They consist of his research papers, letters from people who were ill, a lovely letter from a young boy saying he’d enjoyed meeting Crick and letters from colleagues. They all give you a sense that Crick, like all scientists, was – of course – a real person. It makes science seem less removed from normal life.

Crick was keen for his work to become a part of this vast medical library, which anyone can access free of charge. On the day I visited, the library was packed with medical students cramming for exams. Perhaps one day, one of those students will make a breakthrough in healing and add their work to the collection, alongside the discoveries of herbalists in the fifth century and scientists like Crick.


[Crick’s doodle of a DNA molecule] As we leafed through Crick’s papers I instantly recognized the spiralling ladder that carries the Earth’s variety of life forms.


[Watson and Crick with their model of DNA] They made a model as a way to represent, in reality, the ideas they were carrying around in their heads.


[Crick wins a Nobel Prize] Telegram to Crick announcing his Nobel Prize, 1962. He won the prize jointly with Watson and Dr Maurice Wilkins for their work on the molecular structure of DNA and ‘its significance for information transfer in living material’.


AS WE WALKED ACROSS THE great hall, we started chatting. Finkel is very friendly, kind, interesting and seriously clever. He is one of only a hundred or so people in the world who can read cuneiform, the oldest form of writing in the world.

He was first shown the basics of how to read the script, when he started at university and he knew ‘within about 20 minutes this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my existence’. He learned cuneiform, and later applied to work with it at the British Museum. He got the job. ‘In that moment, I achieved my life’s ambition.’

Since that day in 1979, he has been working on the world’s largest, most cosmic jigsaw puzzle, piecing together pieces of cuneiform writing. His domain has been the Arched Room, a three-tiered room where all 120,000 of the British Museum’s behind the scenes cuneiform tablets are stored.

On the top two levels are books about cuneiform and the cultures that employed this form of writing. On the ground level is a long run of tables for cuneiform scholars to write at. The walls are lined with bookshelves that once stored the British Library’s Mills and Boon collection. Now they are filled with trays, each one containing glass-topped boxes. Inside the boxes are clay tablets covered with ancient cuneiform writing. It looks like an alien script.

Cuneiform script is made up of short, straight lines which go in different directions. The lines (called wedges) were imprinted in pieces of soft clay with a cut reed, used like a pen; ‘It looked a bit like a chopstick,’ explained Finkel. Cuneiform means ‘wedge shaped’, from the Latin cuneus, or wedge. The word doesn’t rhyme with uniform: you pronounce it ‘cu-neigh-i-form’.

A lot of the clay tablets in Finkel’s domain come from the Royal Library of King Ashurbanipal, who lived in the sixth century BC. ‘He was king of the world at the time,’ Finkel told me, ‘a proper Arabian Nights king – harems, exotic foods, hundreds of servants, chariots.’ But he was also literate, and he loved clay books. He built his capital in a city called Nineveh (today called Kuyunjik, in Iraq) and, at the heart of his palace, in the citadel, he created his library.

The library contained spells, myths about gods and heroes, stories of wrestling with bulls, recipes, astrology, medicine, histories, books on fortune telling, poems, love letters – and multiple copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Until I visited Finkel’s realm, I hadn’t been aware that the story had come down through the generations to us written on pieces of baked clay.

The library also housed maps, plans, dictionaries, books of grammar and mundane tax forms, everyday ‘to do’ lists and legal records. There were a few ‘weirdo’ things, also, Finkel told me. ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Well, you know, strange dramas: there is one about a relationship between a god and his mother-in-law that was probably performed as a play in Babylon.’

The king ordered every temple in Babylonia, in the south, to give him a copy of every piece of literature they owned. In some cases, pieces of writing had to be commandeered for the royal library.

Every piece of clay writing in the library is written in exactly the same style of cuneiform. The king employed a roomful of scribes to read every single thing that went into the library and copy it out into perfect Assyrian cuneiform writing, ‘like BBC English,’ Finkel suggests. Important things were baked to terracotta, so that they would survive for a long time, and less important things were simply laid out in the sun to dry.

The cuneiform on one particular clay tablet looks completely different to the rest. It has really big, childish writing on it and looks totally out of place. Finkel picked it up and began reading, tracing his finger across the clay tablet in his hands.

Turn your faces to the petition manifest in my raised hands. May your fierce hearts rest, May your reins be appeased, grant me reconciliation That I may sing your praises without forgetting to the widespread people.

It’s an incantation, written in a child’s hand, with letters a centimetre high which aren’t joined up. It was written by King Ashurbanipal when he was a child and learning to write. This is his school exercise book. Just as you might still have a school exercise book or two at home, to remind you of when you were learning to write, the king must have decided to keep this clay tablet as a souvenir of his childhood, a marker of the days when his love of literature was formed.

The tablet begins, ‘Ea, Shamash, and Marduk, what are my iniquities?’ and continues with an incantation to the gods to forgive the writer and release him from sickness. The prayer is written to appease the wrath of a god who has stricken him down with illness.

In the young king’s case, at the time, he was more than likely copying the incantation out as an exercise.

‘How old do you think he was when he wrote this?’ I asked Finkel.

‘About 12?’ he replied. ‘We don’t know for sure.’ There is only one tablet in the world of which scholars feel sure about the age of the scribe. That is because the scribe bit his tablet. Thousands of years later, the American curator who looked after it saw the teeth marks, slipped the tablet in his pocket and took it to his dentist. The dentist said that the marks were made by the teeth of a seven-year-old boy who lived over two millennia ago.

The boy who copied out the incantation grew up, became king, ruled for 39 years and, over that time, built up an epic library. Two and a half thousand years ago, the clay tablets were stored upright on shelves, like we store books – except for a few things, such as love letters, which were kept in baskets.

The fact that the library has survived is something of a miracle. Towards the end of King Ashurbanipal’s reign, the city of Nineveh was ransacked and destroyed by the Medes and the Babylonians. They set the king’s precious library on fire. A whole upper floor came crashing down to the ground, and the tablets were smashed into pieces; the city was left in ruins. Bizarrely, this devastation saved the library from destruction. The fire baked the library’s clay tablets into terracotta, which survived for thousands of years inside the earth.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s first archaeologists started digging around what was once Nineveh and found these pieces of baked, smashed-up clay with strange writing upon them. Some pieces that had been caught in the fire were black; others, which the fire had missed, were damp after millennia inside the earth. Fortunately some of these were still intact. All the archaeologists had to do was lay them out in the sun to dry, just as the scribes had done when they were creating the library back in the sixth century BC.

Thanks to the archaeological permit, the pieces were brought to England to the British Museum. Over time, the meaning of the writing was worked out. The Babylonians unwittingly left a code for the nineteenth century scholars who had discovered them.

The cuneiform tablets in the library are written either in Sumerian, which is unlike any language we have today, or in Akkadian, which is related to modern Semitic languages and easier to make sense of. The Babylonians also wrote bilinguals, with a line of Sumerian translated into a line of Akkadian. ‘The bilinguals are gold dust,’ said Finkel. ‘This was code-cracking with a crib from the codemaker.’ In the nineteenth century, the decipherers of Akkadian began with words like ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘tree’, and with numbers, then began to recognize prefixes and suffixes and slowly worked out the shape of the language. Once they’d worked out how to read Akkadian, they used the bilinguals to work out Sumerian.

Ever since then, curators have been gluing fragments of the clay tablets back together. ‘This is the greatest jigsaw of all time,’ Finkel explained. Each time a piece of clay is matched to another piece found smashed in the ground, a spell, an ancient recipe or a story comes back into the light.

Over the last three decades, Finkel has been slowly bringing more and more of ancient Nineveh into the twenty-first century. He loves the thrill of it: ‘There is nothing so satisfying as the moment when you rejoin two pieces of writing that have been separated for two and a half thousand years. Of course, the tablets are often broken at the most exciting moment, just when the hero finds the heroine, and says …’ Finding out the rest of the ancient story when you find the missing piece of clay tablet must be a sublime moment.

In many tablets that weren’t part of Ashurbanipal’s library, Finkel can recognize the work of different hands, just by looking at the shape of the calligraphy on different tablets; just as we all have different handwriting, each person who wrote on a clay tablet wrote in a slightly different way.

Almost all of the tablets, no matter what their size, are covered with writing, on the back and on the front. ‘If you write a postcard home to your auntie, you usually fill all the space up, don’t you?’, Finkel asked me. The scribes of Nineveh of 600 BC were no different.

They put a little more effort into their writing in one sense, though, by inventing right-justified text. If they couldn’t fill a line with text, they filled it with dots or drew a horizontal line. ‘It looks more authoritative. We do it sometimes, now that we have computers, but we don’t often make the effort, like they did, when we’re writing by hand.’ He pointed out the dots and lines on some clay tablets to me so I could see it for myself.

Finkel is a great host. He is able to make the Ancient Assyrian world come alive. When I left the Arched Room and walked into the public galleries of the British Museum, I found myself in Room 9, which is filled with reliefs from the king’s palace in Nineveh. Suddenly, everything in that room was shimmering with life. I now know that beyond the reliefs showing images of battle and war is a library filled with love letters, stories, poems, spells, recipes and a school exercise book of the last great king of Assyria.

Anyone can go to the Arched Room to take a look: ‘If you have the keys to treasure, as we do, it is unforgivable not to give people access to it. We’re very proud that anyone can come in here and read and see things they would like to see,’ Finkel explained. He often shows children the wonderful clay tablets and would love to persuade them to learn cuneiform and enjoy the rewards it brings. ‘There is still so much to do. We need students to study cuneiform and keep the giant jigsaw going.’

I had a look at his actual keys, the huge bunch of them he carries around each day. The biggest, oldest one is the key to the collection: it opens the Arched Room in which the tablets are stored. On it are the words ‘If lost, 20 shillings reward’ – not a generous reward then, considering the treasures the key can unlock for you.


[Irving Finkel in the Arched Room] Irving Finkel is assistant keeper for Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the British Museum in London. He showed me a selection of clay tablets covered in cuneiform writing, the world’s oldest known script.


[A cut reed] Cuneiform appeared in ancient Iraq in about 3000 BC, first as a simple pictographic system, but rapidly evolving into a fluent means of recording language. The lines of the script (called wedges) were pressed into the clay with a cut reed, used like a pen; ‘It looked a bit like a chopstick,’ explained Finkel.


[The library at Nineveh] King Ashurbanipal built his capital in a city called Nineveh. At the heart of his palace he lovingly built up a library, filled with the clay tablets Finkel showed me in the British Museum.


[Cuneiform on a clay tablet] This clay tablet was King Ashurbanipal’s school exercise book. He may have put it in his library as a keepsake from the days when, as a child, he learned to write.


[The Epic of Gilgamesh] Until I met Finkel I didn’t know that the Epic of Gilgamesh came down to us written on a series of baked clay tablets.


IN THE WORLD OF MUSEUMS, Vladimir Nabokov, who most famously wrote Lolita, which I loved, is better known for his butterfly expertise than he is for his novels. While writing piles of books, Nabokov collected butterflies across America, published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species and, in 1942, he was made curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He set up shop in the museum, behind the scenes. I went to visit his former office.

The room is lined with metal drawers, each filled with rows of butterflies. Lots of his butterflies are stored in the drawers, along with thousands of others collected by different curators over the years. There is a desk pushed up against a window that looks out over the university campus. Nabokov worked from here. It’s a different desk that is now used by the current butterfly curator, but it is kept in the same place.

I stood by the desk and looked out of the window, and I saw students milling about chatting, eating lunch, reading and daydreaming. I imagined Nabokov doing the same, looking out, over butterflies, to watch the students at play. The only difference now is that today they’re reading iPads rather than books and there are food trucks, not packed lunches. Otherwise, I’d imagine Nabokov would feel right at home.

There is a photograph of him framed and hung on the wall beside the window. The image shows him holding up a butterfly, one of the hundreds he prepared in this room.

In the corner, by another window, is a small, dusty, wooden cabinet. It’s about a metre high, with two doors. Open the doors, and inside are hundreds of little glass vials, with corks for lids. Inside each one is a tiny butterfly penis. There are more butterfly bits on glass slides, stacked inside small boxes on shelves inside the cabinet.

There are also index cards that seem to be written in Nabokov’s writing; they describe each of the genitalia. Like the specimens, they are just as he left them in the 1940s.

I took out a box, picked out a slide and held it to the light. I could just about make out a little black spike: the genitalia of a single male blue butterfly. The glass vials used to have preserving liquid inside them but the fluid has dried out since Nabokov prepared them, so each butterfly penis now rattles around inside its bottle. It is really quite a strange thing to do – to hold a glass bottle, containing a butterfly’s penis, collected years ago by the famous author.

It might seem a bit of a weird thing for him to have done, that is, if you’ve read his novels but don’t know much about butterfly curating. But a butterfly curator wouldn’t find his collection strange at all. Studying male butterfly genitalia is one of the best ways of telling one species apart from another. It’s a better way than looking at just their wings and their size, because many butterflies look so similar.

The cabinet isn’t very important to the butterfly world – there is nothing of great scientific importance inside it – but I found it fascinating that Nabokov loved butterflies as much as books. His twin passions wove their way through his life from when he was young.

His father taught him as a child to chase, catch and collect butterflies while roaming around their family home of Vyra, in north-western Russia, and a love of butterflies was something they shared together. His mother showed him how to really look and to remember. These skills would come in handy for both writing and butterfly curating.

When his father was imprisoned in Russia for his political activities, eight-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a present.

Nabokov was forced into exile in Europe in 1919. There he visited vast museum halls to look closely at the shimmering rainbow of butterflies on display. He married in Berlin in 1925, and he and his wife Vera roamed the mountains at weekends, collecting hundreds of specimens.

By 1940, he was living in Paris and, when the German tanks rolled in, he and his wife and their son, Dimitri, fled to America. In his apartment he left behind a set of European butterflies.

It was in America that he took up his first professional appointment in the world of butterflies, as a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was appointed in 1942 and stayed for six years. He had imagined being a curator as a child and collected all the time.

In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he describes how his governess sat on a tray full of butterflies he had collected himself and squashed them: ‘… A precious gynandromorph, left side male, right side female, whose abdomen could not be traced and whose wings had come off, was lost for ever: one might re-attach the wings, but one could not prove that all four belong to that headless thorax on its bent pin.’

At Harvard he saw plenty of these gynandromorphs, part of the huge collection created by butterfly curators over the decades. I saw one for myself; it is kept in one of the metal drawers – one wing was iridescent blue, the other half blue-half black with white flecks. Other interesting butterflies I saw, lifeless on pins, were a now-extinct Xerxces Blue, which once flew in the San Francisco area, and a huge green and yellow butterfly whose collector had been eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea.

Over 20 butterflies have been named in Nabokov’s honour, including ‘Lolita’ and ‘Humbert’, which are named after the two main characters in Lolita. He wrote the novel on index cards while on butterfly-collecting trips with Vera. After he’d finished writing, she’d type up his handwritten cards. When he tried to burn an early draft, she saved the pages from the flames.

The Nabokovs loved these long, butterfly-collecting adventures. They would set off from Harvard at weekends and during the holidays: Vera always at the wheel, because Nabokov never learned to drive. Once they drove a thousand miles across North America, taking on a blazing Kansas storm, just to spot a single species of butterfly.

Blue butterflies fascinated him, and he and Vera would pursue them all over the North American wilderness. Once he’d collected his specimens he would study their genitalia, looking carefully at the barbs and the shape of each one. His best work on butterflies was a paper about Polyommatus blue butterflies. He examined the genitalia of 120 of the creatures, which lived in the Neotropics, and found that different species had flown to the New World from Asia in a series of waves over millions of years. He said that ‘a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine’ would have witnessed the colonization.

At the time, his findings weren’t really given much credit, but recently, in 2011, researchers at Harvard University sequenced DNA from the blues and found that Nabokov’s musings were correct. Blue butterflies flew in five waves from Asia to the New World – just as Nabokov had at one time emigrated with his family from Europe to America.

When asked in an interview for The Paris Review in 1967 whether he had felt at home during his time in America, Nabokov said he was ‘as American as April in Arizona’. Asked if anything reminded him of the Russia of his youth, he replied, ‘my butterfly hunting, in a loop of time, seemed at once to resume the butterfly chases of my vanished Vyra.’ The ‘fairly wild’ landscapes of north-western America were, he pointed out, ‘surprisingly similar to the Arctic expanses of northern Russia’.

Butterflies reminded him of home and, wherever life took him, he felt comfortable, butterfly net in hand, waiting to catch one of his precious, delicate creatures – rather like catching memories and ideas, and transforming them into characters at his writing desk. ‘My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music,’ he once wrote. ‘My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.’

In a letter to his sister (1945), Nabokov wrote that ‘to know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.’

He became utterly hooked on collecting, pinching the delicate, colourful creatures at the thorax, then studying them carefully to find out everything he could about them. There was a price to pay – late in life, Nabokov’s eyesight failed, ruined by all the hours he’d spent looking at tiny genitalia under a microscope in the back room of Harvard’s museum.


[Nabokov at home, 1965] Vladimir Nabokov loved everything to do with butterflies; he read about them, drew them, wrote about them and collected them throughout his life.


[Nabokov’s butterfly cabinet] Nabokov kept his butterfly penis specimens inside little glass vials, packed into cigar boxes.


[Butterfly hunting] Nabokov and his wife Vera spent weekends butterfly hunting.


[Morpho butterfly] Rare genetic mutations produce gynandromorphs like this morpho butterfly, which is male on the left side and female on the right. Nabokov wrote about finding a gynandromorph as a young boy and was pleased that Harvard had one in its collection.


SO ASKED CHARLES DICKENS. He had at least three cats. One was named William, until Dickens realized she was a girl and renamed her Williamina. She had kittens, and he kept one, which became known as the Master’s Cat. It used to snuff out his candle to get his attention. A third cat was called Bob. He helped Dickens open his letters.

Bob wasn’t a spectacularly talented cat; the way he helped was rather odd. When dear Bob passed on in 1862, Georgina Hogarth, who was Dickens’s sister-in-law, had his little paw – which once padded around on the author’s lap, walking all over his writing or whatever he was trying to read, as cats seem to love to do – immortalized as the handle of a letter opener.

She had the strange feline and ivory piece engraved ‘C. D. In Memory of Bob. 1862’ and gave it to Dickens as a gift, to remind him of the love of his cat. He kept it in the library at Gad’s Hill, so that it was at his side as he wrote. It is now in the Berg reading room on the third floor of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. It shares a space with Dickens’s writing desk and chair – the ones he used when travelling – and 13 prompt copies the author had made to help him when doing public readings.

What’s a prompt copy? I’ll let Isaac Gewirtz, the Berg curator explain: ‘Dickens wasn’t only a great writer, he was a fantastic actor: he loved to perform his work, rather than simply read extracts from it. He filleted his novels, pulling out the most dramatic scenes. Then he had two or three copies printed and bound in case he lost one. His main copy he annotated, with stage directions and cues for himself. We have 13 annotated prompt copies here in the Berg.’

How brilliant to be able to see what Dickens’s audiences couldn’t.

One of the most popular of his readings was A Christmas Carol. The library owns the prompt copy he used to perform the story at public readings. He made this particular copy in a unique way.

Over to Isaac: ‘He had a binder remove the leaves from an 1849 copy of his novel and stick them to blank leaves which were then bound together as a new volume. Then he took this new book and read through his text, rewriting and simplifying tricky sentences. He got rid of evocative passages that set the scene in London and cut out descriptions of characters’ emotional states because he could convey those in the tone of his voice.’

He covered the copy with annotations, like a stage manager might annotate a script for a performance. He added cues, such as ‘Tone down to Pathos’ and ‘Up to cheerfulness’, which would remind him of how to play scenes; and he also underlined bits, such as ‘For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.’ He used postage stamps as Post-it notes, to mark the places he wanted to read from. The corners of the stamps that were stuck on to the page are still there, while the bits that stuck out have fallen off.

His cat Bob, who was immortalized in the letter opener, was named after Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s assistant in A Christmas Carol. It’s fitting then that Bob’s paw shares a cabinet with the library’s prompt copy of the tale the writer used for years at his wildly popular readings.

Several of these readings took place in America. He made two tours there: the first, in 1842, turned a bit ugly when he criticized American publishers for pirating his works, and when he travelled in the South, saw slavery at first hand for the first time and wrote angry articles against it. When he came back in 1867, all was forgiven. This time, he performed twice in New York, in the cavernous Steinway piano display hall on East 14th Street, and at the largest church in Brooklyn. People lined up in the snow for tickets – some even slept outside to be sure of a spot in the crowd: the queue, by opening time, was a mile long. The lucky people inside heard Dickens read from the book that is now in the library.

Reading it doesn’t give you the perfect idea of what his audiences heard each night – no two performances were the same. Sometimes Dickens would make things up on the spur of the moment, or slam the book shut with a flourish and perform from memory. He knew his stories by heart and could act them perfectly.

So how did the letter opener and prompt copies end up in New York? Well, when Dickens died, he bequeathed his estate to his sister-in-law, the lady who had given him the macabre letter opener. She wrote letters of authenticity for everything.

She sold some things, and passed others on to Dickens’s son. The letter opener and other Dickensian treasures were bought by a publisher in New York called E. P. Dutton; they had a sale, and two brothers – physicians of Jewish Hungarian descent called Albert and Henry Berg – turned up and bought the lot, to add to their glittering collection of American and British literature.

In 1940, the surviving brother, Albert, gave everything to the New York Public Library, and built an Austrian oak-panelled room for researchers. The Berg reading room was the result.

The street that leads to the New York Public Library is lined with quotations. I read them on my way to visit the library, then I walked up the steps to the entrance, which are guarded by two lions, cats a lot bigger than Bob.

When you walk into the Berg reading room, you see, on the right-hand side, a portrait of Henry Berg, beside the works of his favourite writer, Thackeray; and on the left-hand side is Albert’s portrait and all the writings of Albert’s favourite author, Charles Dickens. Only the researchers, most of whom come by appointment to read items in the collection, see the prompt copies, while waiting for a book to be brought for them from the vaults.

Albert Berg left a handsome sum to pay for future curators, and to make sure their collection of the works of 104 authors continued to grow. The first curator, John Gordon, who would become a friend of Albert Berg, acquired Virginia Woolf’s papers in 1958. He took them home with him and laid them out on the living room floor so that he and his family could have a good read through them all.

Isaac is in charge today, and he would never do such a thing. ‘That was a different time,’ he said. ‘Today we have works, printed and manuscript, by over 400 authors, with manuscripts and letters by and to Trollope, Keats, Wordsworth, Conrad, Hardy and Yeats, and the largest collection of Virginia Woolf and Auden papers in the world.’ They even have Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, which was found in the river after she had drowned herself.

The Berg Collection is still growing: ‘We have the papers of Annie Proulx, Paul Auster and my favourite author, Vladimir Nabokov.’ I told Isaac I’d seen Nabokov’s butterfly cabinet at Harvard University, and he said, ‘Oh yes, we have most of the journals he annotated and his scientific drawings of butterflies.’

I was interested to know what happens with modern authors, because surely so many first drafts are now on computer hard drives, and so many letters are sent by email. ‘Paul Auster tends to type letters and fax them, and keep the faxed copy, so the library has his outgoing and incoming letters, which is unusual. For several authors we have some floppy disks containing emails, and sometimes we get printouts of emails as well’.

Everything is stored safely in the Berg vaults, except for material relating to the brothers’ two favourite writers – Thackeray and Dickens – and of course the letter opener made from the paw of Dickens’s beloved cat Bob.

I asked Isaac what his favourite things are? ‘If the whole place were on fire and I could rescue only one item, I would probably save T. S. Eliot’s typescript of The Waste Land, with his annotations on it, because of its monumental status in the history of English literature. I also love William Blake and if permitted a second object I’d save his Songs of Innocence and Experience with its beautiful watercolours – created using a technique of relief etching which he devised, he said, through instructions given to him in a vision of his dead brother. Or maybe works by Nabokov…’


[Charles Dickens’s letter opener] The handle is made out of his cat Bob’s paw.


[Charles Dickens performing his work] Dickens loved to give public readings and had prompt copies of his work made, which he could annotate and then use to read from on the nights of his performances.


[Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–70)]


[Prompt copy of David Copperfield] This belonged to Charles Dickens. He used it when he gave readings of his novel. It belongs to the Berg reading room at the New York Public Library, so only researchers who come by appointment get to see it, while waiting for a book to be brought for them from the vaults.


THE NIGHT THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL opened its doors for the first time, on Wednesday, 25 March 1741 at eight o’clock, all the lamps and candles in the temporary building in Hatton Garden were blown out. The Foundling Hospital wanted the mothers who were unable to care for their babies to be able to slip unnoticed through the doors and deposit their tiny, warm bundles in secret.

By midnight the hospital was full. Many mothers were turned away. The Foundling Hospital committee minutes describe how ‘on this Occasion the Expressions of Grief of the Women whose Children could Not be admitted were Scarcely more observable than those of some of the Women who parted with their Children, so that a more moving Scene can’t well be imagined.’ The Foundling Hospital had adopted 30 tiny foundlings; 18 baby boys and 12 tiny girls, all sleeping, feeding and squawking.