I began to wonder if all museums were like this - housing things that only researchers and curators know about? A few days passed and the seed began to unfurl its roots and I decided to call a few more museums and ask them whether they had any treasures behind the scenes that they rarely display. As I emerged from the storage into the light of the museum itself, the seed of the idea for a book landed lightly upon me. The space was zinging with possibility and stories, and I caught the bug for backstage. 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.
One of those specimens, an Anglerfish couple, made it into the pages of this book. The curators showed me their favourite specimens that live amongst shelves of glass jars containing fish from every country on earth. 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. 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. That changed when two fish curators from the Natural History Museum invited me to look around their fishy realm. I used to visit the public areas, notebook in hand, scribbling down question ideas without realising that behind closed doors, most of each museum's collection is hidden away from public view. One of the things I'm often asked 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 also co-write a weekly QI column in the Saturday Telegraph and research a Radio 4 programme called The Museum of Curiosity. Since 2002 I have been a writer and researcher for the television show QI. As the seed of my idea grew into a seedling, I began to unearth some of these reasons.
Introduction Usually there is more hidden away than there is on display.
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