The African Heart of a Modern Naturalist’s Library

Inside Jon Saggerson’s Book Collection

Walk into Jon Saggerson’s study and you feel it immediately; the gravitational pull of a room built on a century and a half of natural history, exploration, and the pursuit of understanding of the animal world. Books line the walls in dense, weighty ranks; skulls and horns sit like punctuation marks between the volumes. This is not a decorative library, though. It’s the intellectual engine behind Jon’s reputation as one of the UK’s leading taxidermists and naturalists.

And at the centre of it all lies Africa.

Essentially, it’s not the Africa of modern field guides and conservation reports, but the Africa that shaped Victorian and Edwardian science. Its books tell of the African adventures of Livingstone, Stanley, Selous, Demidoff, Barnes, Bell, and Lyell and its the long history of how Europeans attempted to describe, classify, and sometimes dominate the natural world.

Africa as the Victorian Imagination’s Frontier

The late‑19th and early‑20th centuries produced an extraordinary body of literature on African exploration. These were not merely travelogues; they were scientific documents, ethnographic records, and, in many cases, the first detailed descriptions of species and ecosystems that would later become central to zoology.

Jon’s shelves hold essential and interesting works:

The Explorers:

David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels, Zambesi Expedition, and Last Journals – some of the texts that made Africa a subject of British fascination
H. M. Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone and In Darkest Africa – part adventure, part imperial propaganda, part proto‑natural history.
John Hanning Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile – a cornerstone of Victorian geographical science.
Richard Francis Burton’s Lake Regions of Central Africa – a masterpiece of ethnography and zoological observation.
Samuel White Baker’s The Albert N’Yanza and The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia – rich with early descriptions of African megafauna.
Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa – sharp, witty, and scientifically invaluable.

The Hunter – Naturalists:

Frederick Courteney Selous whose A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa and Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa remain essential reading for anyone studying African game.
Arthur H. Neumann Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa, a classic of early elephant behaviour study.
W. D. M. “Karamojo” Bell The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter, famous for its brain‑shot diagrams and meticulous anatomical notes.
Denis D. Lyell The African Elephant and Its Hunters and Memories of an African Hunter, both books are rich with behavioural insight.

The wider African archive:

Verney Lovett Cameron – Across Africa
Joseph Thomson – Through Masai Land
Charles John Andersson – Lake Ngami and The Okavango River
Henry Drummond – Tropical Africa
Percival – A Game Ranger on Safari
Major G. H. Anderson – The Lion and the Elephant
E. J. Glave – In Savage Africa

The Connection with Rowland Ward: Prince Elim Demidoff, the Russian nobleman

Jon has recently added to his library: Prince Elim Demidoff’s Hunting Trips in the Caucasus (1898) and After Wild Sheep in the Altai and Mongolia (1900) which together form a matched pair of late‑Victorian sporting‑travel narratives that chart his progression as an aristocratic hunter‑explorer and printed by Rowland Ward.

The Caucasus volume is the more rugged and episodic of the two, built around three distinct expeditions across the Kuban district, the Persian frontier, and the high Caucasian ranges. It is dominated by the pursuit of tur, ibex, and other mountain game, and is notable for its dense illustration, fold‑out map, and detailed accounts of terrain, weather, and the physical demands of high‑altitude hunting.

Demidoff’s voice is confident, observational, and steeped in the Rowland Ward ethos of specimen‑collecting and trophy measurement, giving the book a strong sense of the era’s imperial sporting culture.

Read together, the two works trace a coherent arc: from the steep, rock‑cut corries of the Caucasus to the sweeping Mongolian uplands, revealing both the continuity of Demidoff’s patrician hunting ethos and the widening geographical and cultural horizons of fin‑de‑siècle expeditionary travel.

A Living Archive

In the end, Jon’s library is not a museum. It is a living archive. It is a room that tells a story, not just of Africa, but of the people who tried to understand it, and of a modern naturalist who continues that work today.