New Book
The Collector
By Robert Chinnery
BOOK LAUNCH AT TENNANTS AUCTIONEERS 11TH NOVEMBER 2026: NATURAL HISTORY SALE
Meet Rob Chinnery and Errol Fuller at Tennants on 11th November 2026
Chinnery will personally launch the book at Tennants November Natural History & Taxidermy Sale, with Errol Fuller himself present.
This rare event offers a unique chance to meet them personally, get one of the 400 signed copies, and discuss a project that Fuller has dedicated six decades to, inspiring respect and deep interest.
STRICTLY A LIMITED NUMBER OF COPIES
Only 400 copies will exist, each signed and numbered, published by Kendall House Antiques Ltd.
This exclusivity is set to make collectors and enthusiasts feel privileged to own and collect it, just like “A Record of Spicers” did.
Even if you can’t attend the sale, you can still order your copy in advance – reserve yours now before they are all gone!
ROBERT CHINNERY’S WORLD
On the cover of Robert Chinnery’s new book hangs an old trade sign, its gilt lettering worn thin with age: E. FULLER. It has the exact look of a shop plate salvaged from some long-closed Victorian naturalist’s premises – precisely the sort of object Chinnery has spent a career tracking down, dating and placing.
There was, of course, no such firm. It is a small joke, and a well-judged one: a book about Errol Fuller, dressed as an artefact from Fuller’s own world.
Not quite like anything else on the bookshelf
The book is called “The Collector”, and it is not quite like anything else on a taxidermy bookshelf. It opens with a short fictional story about Fuller, written by Chinnery himself, based on truth and a little coincidence. It is deliberately brief, but it sets the terms for everything that follows.
The bulk of the book – its real subject – is a collection of forty-five personal recollections of Fuller, written by the family, friends, collectors, authors, artists and dealers who know him.
The final section is a picture gallery: over two hundred images of Victorian taxidermy, most of it held in private collections or museum storerooms rarely open to outsiders, each accompanied by a short account of the firm that made it.
A Life That’s Worth A Book
For any reader familiar with Errol Fuller, then what follows will need little elaboration. For anyone new to the field, it’s worth explaining why a whole book of other people’s memories of one man makes sense.
Fuller is the author of over a dozen books including Extinct Birds, The Great Auk, Dodo: From Extinction to Icon, and, with Sir David Attenborough, Drawn from Paradise, among a long list of others; he wrote Voodoo Salon, his own walk through the world of taxidermy collecting; and he has spent decades as a collector in the field, latterly acting as a consultant to Summers Place Auctions on their natural history sales. He also paints, in oils, subjects that have nothing to do with any of this – snooker and boxing, the “disreputable” end of English sporting life – which reveals something about a man that isn’t easily summarised by his subject matter.
“There can hardly be a more interesting life for a project”.
Ray Ching, Wildlife Artist, in correspondence with Robert Chinnery
Robert Chinnery, Recording It
Chinnery’s name will already be familiar to regular readers of this site. His book “A Record of Spicers” remains the standard reference on Peter Spicer & Sons, still cited by museums and auction houses alike. In 2002, Warwickshire Museum commissioned him to re-case a group of uncased Spicer specimens, work that drew directly on that expertise.
He and his wife Rachel run Kendall House Antiques, formerly The Victorian Taxidermy Company, in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire – Kendall House Antiques Ltd is also the book’s publisher – and Chinnery deals once again in Victorian taxidermy through the website: victoriantaxidermy.co.uk.
Amongst many pieces previously in his own collection, is the Coniston Fox, Peter Spicer’s celebrated tableau, mentioned on this site before now. He is, in other words, exactly the kind of collector the book’s central section is built from. He is not a biographer working from a distance. Instead, he is himself one of the forty-five voices.
Forty-Five Voices
The recollections of these “voices” are the heart of the book, but this isn’t a biography in the conventional sense with a continuous narrative. It is closer to an oral history, told by everyone from Fuller’s family to the dealers who have bought and sold alongside him, each contributing a memory rather than a chapter. Read individually, each account is presumably a portrait of one relationship; read together, they should build into something closer to a group portrait of the taxidermy and natural history world Fuller has moved through for six decades – its rivalries, its friendships, its running jokes, and the particular kind of obsession that holds it together. Errol Fuller has, by all accounts, collected friends with much the same appetite he has collected specimens; a book assembled this way is, structurally, the right response to that.
A Gallery Behind Closed Doors
The picture section that closes the book is reason enough, on its own, to want a copy.
Virtually every case illustrated is either in a private collection or deep in a museum’s storage department – the kind of material most of us will never be shown, let alone see photographed, however long we spend on this.
Each image comes with a short biography of the Victorian firm responsible, which should make this section useful well beyond its role as illustration: a working reference to firms whose surviving output is otherwise scattered and under-documented.
ORDER YOUR COPY OF “THE COLLECTOR” NOW
Copies cost £60 each, with postage of £6 within the UK or £12 overseas if you can’t collect in person at Tennants in November. Books will be posted out after the Tennants event has taken place.
To place your order now, or to register your interest, contact Kendall House Antiques directly by email here, or download an order form via their UK websites www.kendallhouseantiques.co.uk or www.victoriantaxidermy.co.uk.
With only 400 copies available worldwide, and since Rob Chinnery is still taking subscriptions directly, it’s best to order your copy now rather than be disappointed later.
MADE LIKE THE BEST OF THEM
The physical book has been produced with the kind of care that its subject would presumably approve of – made, in short, the way the best Victorian taxidermy firms made their finest cases: by hand, to a standard that assumes the customer will notice. This craftsmanship invites admiration and a feeling of owning something truly well-made.
- Hardbound to exacting standards by Lavenham Press
- Traditionally lithograph printed, for maximum image quality
- Hand-sewn, with black cloth covers, blind debossed to the front
- Gloss laminated dust jacket
- Pages gilt-edged in gold, with ribbon page markers
- A bespoke page size of 280 x 210mm
- Printed on 150gsm silk-coated paper
- Over 200 images, across more than 300 pages
A BOOK LIKE THIS BELONGS HERE
A book like this sits naturally on this site. The Velvet Drawing Room has always been as much about watching the landscape of taxidermy collecting and natural history interest as it is about excavating its Victorian past – who is writing, who is dealing, who is quietly holding the pieces that matter. If you’ve followed this site for any length of time, you’ll already know the pull of that world, and you’ll already understand exactly why forty-five people offered their own memories about one collector.
I never get to write about a book before the ink on its subject is anywhere near dry. Most of what appears here has to be assembled from parish records, auction catalogues and newspaper archives a century old, because the people involved are long past answering questions.
“The Collector” is the opposite kind of project: it’s a chance to record, while he is still very much here to be asked, an account of one of the field’s most significant living figures, in the words of the people who actually know him. That alone makes it worth the shelf space.
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