Dry Store Room No. 1 Quotes

“A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators. ”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a part of the world.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums. ”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“I wonder if we are seeing a return to the object in the science-based museum. Since any visitor can go to a film like Jurassic Park and see dinosaurs reawakened more graphically than any museum could emulate, maybe a museum should be the place to have an encounter with the bony truth. Maybe some children have overdosed on simulations on their computers at home and just want to see something solid--a fact of life.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“The great museums may harbour the conscience for the natural world, not merely provide its catalogue.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“My contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself--for money.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read "Departmental cock"--I never did find out what that meant. ”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Later . . . the sports jacket became a kind of signature uniform for the museum scientist, complete with leather elbow patches. It indicated an endearing otherworldliness. Too much smartness might betray the wrong priorities, and an inadequate grasp of carabids.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“He was forced to resign from the Museum in 1917 because of ill health.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“One of the curators at the Natural History Museum responsible for lice was Bruce Frederic Cummings, who joined the staff in January 1912.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“It is a sad fact that to many people the loss of a plant species is of less moment than the loss of a football match. I hate the thought that the only record of a beautiful plant might yet be the grave of the herbarium sheet.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Not that I subscribe to the utilitarian view that plants are only good for what we can get out of them—it should be enough to add another beautiful (or even plain) item to nature’s inventory. We need to know what there is in the world for us to look after, regardless of its potential use.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“So my exploration continued, up dark stairwells and down dim passages. I came across a room full of antelope and deer trophies, the walls lined with dozens of ribbed or twisted horns, as if it were the entrance lobby to some stately home owned by a bloodthirsty monomaniac. On another occasion I found my way into one of the towers that flanked the main entrance to the Museum- only to find that to get there one had to take a path that led over the roof. I came across a taxidermist's lair, where a man with an eye patch was reconstructing a badger. I failed to find the Department of Mineralogy altogether, apart from meeting some meteorite experts in their redoubt at the end of the minerals gallery. There seemed to be no end to it. Even now, after more than thirty years of exploration, there are corners I have never visited. It was a place... labyrinthine and almost endless, where some forgotten specialist might be secreted in a room so hard to find that his very existence might be called into question. I felt that somebody might go quietly mad in a distant compartment and never be called to account. I was to discover that this was no less than the truth.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum