Read Dry Storeroom No. 1 for Free Online

gloomier than a grouper’s; it seems to have plenty to be gloomy about, looking as it does. I discovered that it spends most of its life camouflaged and motionless, its ragged skin a perfect disguise, until some prey comes near enough—then that apparently dejected mouth can engulf the unfortunate prey in a trice.
    On another expedition I encountered the General Library (and this is just one of five libraries in the Museum), after entering it accidentally by a side door off one of the public galleries. It was difficult to believe that there could be so many books pertaining to natural history. Situated in a newer part of the Museum, the main reading room was vast, with tomes on shelves all around the perimeter stretching as high as one could reach—and beyond this room there were galleries of further books, and here they were piled so high on shelf after shelf that there were little ladders to help the reader retrieve some of the higher volumes. There are those who find libraries intimidating, but I am not one of them. I like to see the books in their old leather bindings, the shelves stretching away, deeply filled; it gives me a sense of continuity with past scholars. Even so, encountering an enormous library like this for the first time is a humbling experience. Think of all the thousands of workers putting pen to paper to add to the knowledge of the natural world, or to communicate scientific ideas to their colleagues. If all this is known already, how can a new intruder into the world of learning make any mark at all?
    I took down one of the volumes at random:
Acta Universitatis Lundensis
—the scholarly publications of the University of Lund in Sweden. Well over a century of labours by Scandinavian scientists were preserved here in perpetuity, in volume after volume, or at least until paper crumbles away. The older volumes had green leather bindings, scuffed with use and age; newer volumes were cloth-bound, doubtless in the interests of economy. This part of the library was devoted just to Scandinavian journals, for nearby was a huge run of the organ of the Royal Society of Sweden some yards in length, and over there a great swathe of journals from the University of Uppsala, one of the most ancient universities in Europe. In these pages the great Linnaeus published some of his work, which is still cited today. So it went on, with publications from universities and institutes in Sweden and Norway that meant little to me then. And if the works in this segment of the library were just from one little piece of the world, how much greater would be the literature of the United States, or Russia? Or China? The Museum was dedicated to trying to collect
everything
that was published on the natural history of the planet. Once more 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. I crept back to my own little corner.
    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 like Mervyn Peake’s rambling palace of Gormenghast, labyrinthine and almost endless, where some forgotten specialist might be secreted in a room so hard to find that his