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