Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum (Leiden: Jean Elsevier, 1655). History of Science Collection, The Linda Hall. Public domain.
I finally got to meet Ole Worm while hunting for waterbirds. Exploring the history of natural history has taught me to check the most unlikely corners of old illustrations for unusual clues to fascinating stories. Working with a colleague on the history of scholarship on waterbirds led me to see, for the first time, a book that’s always excited me, which The Linda Hall has held for years: Ole Worm’s 1655 Museum Wormianum.
Its frontispiece is an image every Wunderkammer book reprints, and every museum studies student has seen at least once. The image shows a room in Copenhagen so stuffed with narwhal tusks, dried fish, and armadillos that the ceiling barely shows. Look up into those rafters and you’ll see a spoonbill perching there too, elegantly wedged between a sturgeon and a polar bear, leaving a small avian breadcrumb along the trail of our studies.
Ole Worm was a Danish physician who spent decades filling that room, and his son Willum published the catalogue after his death. Four books carry the collection from minerals through plants and animals to carved idols and archaeological finds, and Worm gave a shrunken head the same careful paragraph as a chunk of Baltic amber.
Earlier this year, at the San Francisco rare book fair, a dealer tempted us (successfully) with a slim little companion volume, a painstakingly tabulated list of everything in Worm’s museum by the 24-year-old student Georg Segar. It’s bound, improbably, in a page of Renaissance sheet music, just behind, even more improbably, a 1627 book on food law. Almost no collector alive has heard of it, and that obscurity is its charm: a quiet inventory sitting next to the famous engraving, doing the discreet work of proving the room was real.
Both books belong to the same scholarly world as our exhibition, The Alchemy of Knowledge: Science and Mystery from Shakespeare to AI, that magic, faith, and method spent centuries pulling apart from one tangle into three separate threads. Neither the Worm nor the Segar volumes are currently on display, but both did some of the straightening out of that disruption.
I have loved cabinets of curiosity for as long as I can remember, and The Linda Hall now has one of its own, crowded with specimens old and new, natural, artificial, and somewhere in between (open by appointment). Standing inside it, I know I have the same thrill seeing a conch, a geode, or a badger that Ole Worm did amongst his collection, each specimen representing a story, and a new window on the natural world.
–Eric Dorfman, PhD, President of The Linda Hall: Science Library and Arboretum
