Dry Store Room No. 1, by Richard Fortey

Perhaps it doesn't have the most exciting title in the world, but there is nothing in the least dry about this exploration of life behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum, where the exhibits which the public sees are no more than a front for the serious scientific research – and shenanigans – which go on behind all those doors marked Staff Only.

Richard Fortey, Trilobite Man at the Museum for many years, is an amiable, amusing and erudite guide, with a copious supply of anecdotes about the eccentric personalities who've worked there, such as the botanist Herbert Werner, who after his death was found to have kept a card index of all the women he'd ever slept with, each adorned with a neatly pinned sprig of pubic hair. ("Once a curator, always a curator", as Fortey puts it.)

There was also Geoffrey Tandy, who specialised in studying cryptogams – algae, fungi and plants such as ferns which reproduce using spores and have concealed reproductive organs, named from the Greek for "hidden marriage". Appropriately enough, Tandy ran two families in tandem. During the Second World War, he was called up to join the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, because someone at the MoD thought that cryptogams were the same thing as cryptograms. Fortuitously, he was able to use his expertise in preserving marine algae to save sodden German codebooks which had been fished out of the sea.

Fortey also has a more serious point: that the unglamorous scientific work of taxonomy – identifying and classifying species – is vital, not only for the unexpected discoveries it can lead to, in the field of medicine, for example, but also because it is intrinically valuable to understand our world during our short stay here.