Though I don't doubt for a minute that there are youthful taxidermists out there in the world, I have never encountered one in my many years on the planet. So I was more than surprised when I found this advertisement for the Northwestern School of Taxidermy in a 1957 issue of
Boys Life magazine. The ad poses some interesting questions:
- Can you really learn taxidermy by mail in your spare time?
- Is there really a market for stuffed and mounted pigeons?
- Do taxidermists actually make frog clocks like the one pictured in the ad?
Ah, if we could only get our hands on the
FREE BOOK with 48 pages and a hundred highly interesting pictures . . .
Though I don't doubt for a minute that there are youthful taxidermists out there in the world, I have never encountered one in my many years on the planet. So I was more than surprised when I found this advertisement for the Northwestern School of Taxidermy in a 1957 issue of Boys Life magazine. The ad poses some interesting questions:
2 comments:
I don't know about frog-clocks, but I do remember seeing the most awful taxadermy on a show about endangered animals once. It was a cayman standing upright, holding an ashtray, on a wood base trimmed with fur. Probably rare wood and an endagered animal's fur too. Blech.
I do wonder if that book has the cardinal rule of taxadermy in it: the smaller it is, the more vicious you have to make it look!
Alan Alda gives a great account of actually doing a mail order taxidermy class when he was a kid - maybe this very one - in his book "Never Stuff Your Dog." I recommend the audio version read by the author.
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