Dry Store Room No 1, by Richard Fortey

Though humankind is allotted no more than its fair share in the great South Kensington treasury of the animal, vegetable and mineral, the Natural History Museum is the most human of buildings. It may be admired for its great hall, the most splendid dinosaur showcase ever built; it may be cherished for the carved bestiary that clings to its façade; but those lucky enough to be admitted behind the scenes find themselves in a world that excites the deepest human sympathies.

Labyrinthine and questing, cluttered and restless, compulsively producing knowledge and inevitably mislaying it, the "secret life of the Natural History Museum" (Richard Fortey's subtitle) resembles nothing so much as the inner life of the mind. One may warm to the Museum as one warms to a person: it defies summary and requires personal response. Fortey, lucky enough to spend his working life at the NHM and be allowed to keep his keys into retirement, makes an apt point about the similarity between the museum profession and the demands of life on the mind. "A life accumulates a collection of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators."

Fortey's account benefits, as readers of his earlier books about rocks and fossils would expect, from his warmth and fluency. It also delivers an immensely satisfying moral, Fortey's "First Law of Museums: never throw anything away". This is most vividly illustrated by his story of a palaeontologist whose effects were found to include a box labelled "pieces of string too small to be of use". The same phenomenon was once reported by the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who attributed it to an American curator. Gould relegated it to legendary status. But good tricks often evolve more than once. It is not implausible that curators should have independently devised the same solution to string management.

There was more to traditional curators than elbow patches and string. They typically studied organisms whose unprepossessing appearance concealed remarkable sexual arrangements, and a number came to resemble the objects of their study. By contrast, the Museum mineralogists emerge from Fortey's anecdotes as a much soberer bunch. It seems to have been the life scientists who had the secret lives.

Fortey's serene good humour enables him to write kindly of individuals whose awkward personalities must have made museum routine a frosty affair, especially when warders looked like policemen, and curators could be summoned back from their surburban homes if they forgot to hand in the keys.

Authority has learned to conduct itself differently since. Fortey recalls that Neil Chalmers, who became Director in 1988, "always seemed so pleasant and enthusiastic, rather like a vicar welcoming the parishioners to a car-boot sale, yet people around him had a habit of 'disappearing'." So did scientists' elbow patches, confiscated in a PR offensive.

The populists had arrived, and were shaking out the old elitist order. Museums became embarrassed about the objects that are their raison d'être. Now, however, Fortey feels that museums are getting back in touch with themselves. There is no point in trying to compete with television. Children now want the physical objects they have to visit a museum to see.

Scientists, however, have shifted irreversibly to screens, working with molecular data. In the old days the funds were there for a curator to enter the Museum as a "fish man", "spider man" or, in Fortey's case, a "trilobite man", and remain securely employed as such for the rest of his working life. Today science jumps from contract to contract, ticking boxes as it goes, like any other enterprise.

Fortey believes that "The amateur will enjoy a renaissance." Having entered the old elitist order and seen the populist wave break, he looks forward to a democratic future in which knowledge is produced by a culture of skilled but unpaid workers able to draw electronically upon resources their Victorian predecessors could never have imagined. Museums will enter into mutual relationships with a new civil society of science. Here Fortey's reflections become not just enjoyable and informative, but inspiring.

Marek Kohn's 'A Reason for Everything' is published by Faber & Faber

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