6480The thackery t lambshead cabinet of curiosities exhibits, oddities, images, and stories from top authors and artists

Lambshead’s Cabinet By the Editors... material, not out of some loyalty to theThings of Britain, but more out of asense that “the West still has a lot toanswer for,” as he wrote in his j

The Thackery T LambsheadCabinet of Curiosities

Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors

and Artists

Edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Duds: The Broadmore

Honoring Lambshead:

Stories Inspired by the Cabinet

Threads—Carrie

Vaughn

Ambrose and the

Ancient Spirits of East and

My Nephew by Wells,

Charlotte—Holly Black

A Short History of Dunkelblau’s

Meistergarten—Tad

Williams

Microbial Alchemy and Demented Machinery: The Mignola Exhibits

Addison Howell and

the Clockroach—Cherie

The Miéville Anomalies

The Very Shoe

The Armor of Sir

of One Olivaceous

Cormorant, Stuffed

—Rachel Swirsky

1963: The Argument

Against Louis Pasteur

A Brief Catalog of Other Items

Artist and Author Notes

Story Contributors Artists

Catalog Contributors About the Editors Acknowledgments

Credits

Other Books by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Contradictions of a Collection: Dr Lambshead’s

Cabinet

By the Editors

A photograph of just one shelf inLambshead’s study displaying the

“overflow” from his undergroundcollection (1992) Some items weremarked “return to sender” on the

doctor’s master list

To his dying day, Dr Thackery T.Lambshead (1900–2003) insisted tofriends that he “wasn’t much of acollector.” “Things tend to manifestaround me,” he told BBC Radio once,

“but it’s not by choice I spend a large

part of my life getting rid of things.”

Indeed, one of Lambshead’s biggesttasks after the holiday season each yearwas, as he put it, “repatriating well-

intentioned gifts” with those “who mightmore appropriately deserve them.”Often, this meant reuniting “exotic”items with their countrymen and -women, using his wide network ofcolleagues, friends, and acquaintanceshailing from around the world Acontroversial reliquary box from agrateful survivor of ballistic organsyndrome? Off to a “friend in the SlovakRepublic who knows a Russian whoknows a nun.” A centuries-old

“assassin’s twist” kris (see the Catalogentries) absentmindedly sent by a lord inParliament? Off to Dr Mawar Haqq atthe National Museum in Kuala Lumpur,Malaysia And so on and so forth

He kept very little of this kind of

material, not out of some loyalty to theThings of Britain, but more out of asense that “the West still has a lot toanswer for,” as he wrote in his journals.Perhaps this is why Lambshead spent somuch time in the East Indeed, the eastwing of his ever-more-extensive home inWhimpering-on-the-Brink was hisfavorite place to escape the press duringthe more public moments of his longcareer.

Regardless, over time, his cabinet

of curiosities grew to the point that hissemipermanent loans to variousuniversities and museums became not somuch philanthropic in nature as “acts ofself-defense” (LIFE Magazine,

“Hoarders: Curiosity or a New

Disease?,” May 19, 1975) One of themost frenzied of these “acts” occurred in

“divesting myself of the most asinineacquisition I ever made, the so-calledClockroach”—documented in this veryvolume—“which had this ridiculoushabit of starting all on its own andmaking a massacre of my garden andsometimes a stone fence or two Drove

my housekeeper and the groundskeepermad.”

Breaking Ground

This question of the cabinet’s growthcoincides with questions about itslocation As early as the 1950s, there arerather unsubtle hints in Dr Lambshead’sjournal of “creating hidden reservoirs

for this river of junk” and “darkness andsubterranean calm may be best for thebulk of it,” especially since thecollection “threatens to outgrow thehouse.”

In the spring of 1962, as is documented, builders converged onLambshead’s abode and for severalmonths were observed to leave throughthe back entrance carrying all manner ofsupplies while removing a large quantity

well-of earth, wood, and roots

Speculation began to develop as toLambshead’s intentions “If even Dr.Lambshead despairs of compromise,what should the rest of us, who do nothave the same privilege, do?” asked the

editor of the Socialist Union Guild

Newsletter that year, assuming that

Lambshead, at the time a member, wasbuilding a “personalized bomb shelterwith access to amenities many of uscould not dream to afford in oureveryday lives, nor wish to own for fear

of capitalist corruption.” In the absence

of a statement from Lambshead, the FleetStreet press even started rumors that hehad discovered gold beneath hisproperty, or ancient Celtic artifacts ofincredible value WhateverLambshead’s motivations, he must havepaid the builders handsomely, since theonly recorded comment from theforeman is: “Something’s wrong with the

pipes Full stop.” (Guardian, “Avowed

Socialist Builds ‘Anti-Democracy’

Bunker Basement,” April 28, 1962)

Floor plan found in Lambshead’s privatefiles, detailing, according to a scrawled

note, “the full extent of a museum-qualitycabinet of curiosities that will serve as acathedral to the world, and be worthy of

her.”

Throughout the year, Lambsheadignored the questions, catcalls, andbullhorn-issued directives from thepress besieging his gates He continued

to entertain guests at his by-now palatialhome—including such luminaries asMaurice Richardson, Francis Bacon,Molly Parkin, Jerry Cornelius, GeorgeMelly, Quentin Crisp, Nancy Cunard,Angus Wilson, Philippe Jullian, andViolet Trefusis—and, in general, acted

as if nothing out of the ordinary wasoccurring, even as the workmen labored

until long after midnight and more thanone guest reported “strange metallicsmells and infernal yelping burpscoming up from beneath thefloorboards.” Meanwhile, Lambshead’sseemingly preternatural physical fitnessfueled rumors involving “life-enhancingchambers” and “ancient rites.” Despitebeing in his sixties, he looked not a dayover forty, no doubt due to his early andgroundbreaking experiments with humangrowth hormone.

Why the secrecy? Why the need toignore the press? Nothing inLambshead’s journals can explain it.Indeed, given the damage eventuallysuffered by this subterranean space,there’s not even enough left to map the

full extent of the original excavation Weare left with two floor plans fromLambshead’s private filing cabinet, one

of which shows his estate house inrelation to the basement area—and thustwo contradictory possibilities One ofthem, oddly enough, corresponds inshape to a three-dimensional model of

an experimental flying craft Thiscoincidence has led to one of thestranger accusations ever leveled againstLambshead (not including thoseattributed to contamination scholar RezaNegarestani and obliteration expertMichael Cisco) Art critic Amal El-Mohtar, who for a time attempted toresearch part of Lambshead’s cabinet,claimed that “It became obvious from

Thackery’s notes that he was creating akind of specialized Ark to survive theextermination of humankind, each itemchosen to tell a specific story, and hisparticular genius was to have all of theseobjects—this detritus of eccentricquality—housed within a container thatwould eventually double as aspaceship.” However, it must be notedthat this theory, leaked to varioustabloids, came to El-Mohtar during aperiod of recovery in Cornwall from herencounter with the infamous singing fishfrom Lambshead’s collection Not onlyhad her writings become erratic, but shewas, for a period of time, fond of talking

to wildflowers

Floor plan of what Amal El-Mohtarcalled “a nascent spaceshop nee Ark,”with a front view of Lambshead’s house

beneath it

The most popular of otherapocryphal theories originated with theperformance artist Sam Van Olffen, who,since 1989, has seemed fixated onLambshead and staged several relatedproductions The most grandiose, the

musical The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities

of the Mad Dr Lambshead, debuted in

2008 in Paris and London, well after

Lambshead’s death Perhaps the mostcontroversial of Van Olffen’sspeculations is that Lambshead’sexcavations in 1962 were meant not tocreate a space for a cabinet ofcuriosities but to remodel an existingunderground space that had previouslyserved as a secret laboratory in which

he was conducting illegal medical tests

A refrain of “Doctor doctor doctordoctor! / Whatcher got in there there? Alamb’s head?” is particularly grating

Certainly, nothing about theflashback scenes to the 1930s, or thehints of Lambshead’s affiliation withunderground fascist parties, did anything

to endear Van Olffen’s productions tofans of the doctor, or the popular press

The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities closed

on both Les Boulevards and the WestEnd after less than a month Thecombined effect of media attention forthis “sustained attack on the truth,” asLambshead’s heirs put it in a depositionfor an unsuccessful lawsuit in 2009, hasbeen to distort the true nature of thedoctor’s work and career

A Deep Emotional Attachment?

Despite irregularities and bizarreclaims, one fact seems clear:Lambshead, especially in his later years,formed a deep emotional attachment tomany of the objects in his collection,whether repatriated, loaned out, orretained in his house or underground

A close friend of Lambshead, post–World War II literary icon MichaelMoorcock, who first met the doctor inthe mid-1950s at a party thrown byMervyn Peake's family, rememberedseveral such attachments to objects “Itbecame especially acute in the 1960s,”Moorcock recalled in an interview,

“when we spent a decent amount of timetogether because of affairs related to

New Worlds, ” the seminal science

fiction magazine Moorcock edited at thetime “For a man of science, whoresolutely believed in fact, he could bevery sentimental I remember howdistraught he became during an earlyvisit when he couldn’t find an American

Night Quilt he had promised to showboth me and [J G.] Ballard He became

so ridiculously agitated that I had to say,

‘Pard, you might want to sit downawhile.’ Then he felt compelled to tell

me that he and his first—his only—wife,Helen, who had passed on two or threeyears before, had watched the stars fromthe roof one night early in theirrelationship, and had snuggled under thatquilt One of his fondest memories ofher.” (Independent, “An UnlikelyFriendship?: The Disease Doc and theLiterary Lion,” September 12, 1995)

One of Sam Van Olffen’s stage sets forthe supposed laboratory of Dr.Lambshead, taken from the Parisian

production of the musical The Mad

Cabinet of Curiosities of the Mad Dr Lambshead and supposedly inspired by

Van Olffen’s own encounter with the

cabinet several years before (Le

Monde, March 2, 2008)

The “secret medical laboratory” stage

set for The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities

of the Mad Dr Lambshead A much less

grandiose version of the musical waseventually turned into a SyFy channel

film titled Mansquito 5: Revenge of Dr.

Lambshead, but never aired (Le Monde, March 2, 2008)

One of Lambshead’s few attempts at art,admittedly created “under the influence

of several psychotropic drugs I wastesting at the time.” Lambshead claims

he was “just trying to reproduce thevisions in my head.” S B Potter (see:

“1972” in Visits and Departures)

claimed the painting provided “earlyevidence of brain colonization.”

A fair number of the artifacts in thecabinet dating from before 1961 wouldhave reminded Lambshead of HelenAquilus, a brilliant neurosurgeon whom

he appears to have first met in 1939,courted until 1945, and finally married

in 1950 (despite rumors of a chanceencounter in 1919) She hadaccompanied him on several expeditionsand emergency trips, as a colleague andfellow scientist She had been presentwhen Lambshead acquired many of hismost famous artifacts, such as “TheThing in the Jar,” a puzzler that hauntedLambshead until his death (see: Further

Oddities) She also helped him acquire anumber of books, including a rare

printing of Gascoyne’s Man’s Life Is

This Meat Some have, in fact, suggested

that Lambshead turned toward thepreservation of his collection andbuilding of a space for it as a distractionfrom his grief following Helen’s death in

an auto accident on a lonely country road

in 1960

Other items had significance toLambshead because he had had a hand intheir discovery, like St Brendan’sShank, or in their creation, like the maskfor Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham,a.k.a Roboticus Perhaps most famousamong these is the original of his

psychedelic painting The Family from

1965, which for a time hung in the TateModern’s exhibit “Doctors as Painters,Blood in Paint.” In the painting, Deathstares off into the distance while, behind

it, a man who looks like Lambshead inhis twenties stands next to aphantasmagorical rendering of Helenand her cousins

In many cases, too, these objects, as

he said, “remind me of lost friends”—for example, St Brendan’s Shank, which

he came to possess during World War II,and which, as he wrote in his journal, “Ispent many delightful days researchingalong with my comrades-in-arms, most

of them, unfortunately, now lost to usfrom war, time, disease, accident, andheartbreak.”

One of the few museum exhibit loansever to have been photographed (Zurich,

1970s)—presented as evidence tosupport Caitlin R Kiernan’s accusations

of Lambshead using artifacts to conveysecret messages She claims that Russianartist Vladimir Gvozdev, the creator ofthe mecha-rhino above, does not exist,

and is a front for the “Sino-Siberiancells of a secret society.”

Dr Lambshead’s Personal Life

In searching for a theme or approach tothe cabinet, it may be relevant to return

to the subject of Lambshead’s wife.Throughout his life, and even after herdeath, Lambshead kept his attachment toHelen almost as secret as his cabinet,

and The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket

Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases never mentioned her, or

referenced the marriage Aquilus, aCypriote Greek, came from a long line

of dissenters and activists, and hadoriginally left Athens to go to school at

Oxford She was and, at first, often seen

as a beard for the doctor, since he wasknown to be bisexual and somewhathedonistic in his appetites

Aquilus, though, was a force and acharacter in her own right: agroundbreaking neuroscientist andsurgeon in an era when females in thosefields were unheard of; a researcherwho worked for the British governmentduring World War II to perfect triage fortraumatic head wounds on thebattlefield; and a champion at dressagewho combined such a knack fornegotiation with forcefulness of will thatfor a time she entered the politicalsphere as a spokesperson for theSocialist Party Possessed of prodigious