The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

 

I have been looking for riveting audiobooks and I think that I have settled on the fact that I mostly listen to nonfiction audiobooks because they seem more like podcasts to me. In the same search that led me The Indifferent Stars Above, I also stumbled upon The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson. I had listened to an episode of This American Life about this story (the author was interviewed in that podcast), but thought maybe the book would add to my understanding of the story. 

Basically, this teenage flute-playing phenom gets interested in fly-tying, creating fancy lures for fly-fishing. Part of this interest is in the rare feathers that fly-tiers use to make these lures, feathers from rare, endangered, and sometimes extinct birds. Feathers can be expensive. So this teenager, Edwin Rist, eventually robs a museum in a tiny UK towtown and steals hundreds of birdskins, including some with huge historical and scientific value. This book is that story. How and why did this heist happen and what was the fallout.

From the history naturalists cataloging rare and "exotic" birds by killing and stuffing them to the use of feathers in Victorian hats (so many hat mentions!) to the use of feathers in modern fly-tying, this book examines the history of the feather market. It's also the story about how Johnson himself became a little bit obsessed with solving the mystery of where the birdskins ended up.

Verdict: Slow to get started, but then I could hardly stop listening. It's true crime, but not a violent true crime. It also will force you to do a self-examination about what you think the punishment should have been for a theft of this nature. I did not like how the audiobook narrator changed his voice when there was a woman saying dialogue, but your mileage may vary on how much that will irritate you since it only comes up briefly a few times. 4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Seven years earlier while on vacation from my job coordinating the reconstruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah for USAID I sleepwalked out of a window in a PTSD triggered fugue state and nearly died. (timestamp 11:53)

The framing device was all about why Johnson was so interested in this story. He had previously worked at an organization that was trying to get Iraqis refugee status in the US and it sounds like he had a bad time of it. When he learned about Rist's crimes, he moved his attention to figuring out how the crime went down. He himself moved from one obsession to the next.

Hat mentions (why hats?): The most hats I've counted in a book so far in 2024!

Hats were designed with special compartments for storing specimens gathered on a stroll. (timestamp 25:56)

Young King Charles I, posing for his portrait in 1610, stood confidentially next to a hat bedecked with the stuffed bird of paradise. (timestamp 43:43) 

...ran advertisements for Madame Rollings elegant assortment of Paris millinery on Fifth Avenue in New York and for Knox's Hats -  riding hats, walking hats, driving hats, hats for the theater, receptions, weddings, hats for every social function. (timestamp 1:25:52)

Stiffwings are in high vogue for the ordinary walking hat, spangled wings, egrets, and feathered pom-poms from which a paradise egret emerges are admired for either bonnets or hats.  (timestamp 1:26:18)

And thanks to the everchanging laws of fashion there were unique hats for every occasion, each demanding different species of bird for decoration. Women in America and Europe clamored for the latest plumes, entire bird skins were mounted on hats large so ostentatiously large that women were forced to kneel in their carriages or ride with their heads out the window. In 1886, a prominent ornithologist conducted an informal survey of the extent of the feather fever during an afternoon stroll through an uptown New York shopping district. He counted seven hundred ladies wearing hats, three-quarters of them sporting whole skins.  (timestamp 1:27:24)

And while hats were the main graveyard for these birds, other articles of clothing were frequently festooned with them, as well. (timestamp 1:28:24)

...calling feathered hats the "badge of cruelty." (timestamp 1:38:19)

In 1892, Punch, a British weekly best known for coining the word cartoon, published one of a woman with dead birds on her hat. (timestamp 1:39:00)

Ladies Home Journal followed suit, offering up fashionable alternatives to wearing real birds and publishing photos of bird slaughter with a warning: The next time you buy a feather for your hat, think of these pictures. (timestamp 1:39:57)

The arrival of the automobile meant that women could no longer wear large hats brimming with feathers in the cab of the car. Meanwhile, the growing popularity of cinema rendered it unfashionable, even impolite, to wear large hats that obscured the screen. (timestamp 1:43:05)

As the 21st century approached, US customs officers were no longer checking the necks of seedy sailors, women had long since stopped wearing hats, much less ones festooned with exotic birds...(timestamp 1:47:19)

While women competed for the rarest of plumes for their hats, their husbands showed off by tying them on to their hooks. (timestamp 1:56:02)

..feather-filled hats had been out of fashion for more than a hundred years. (timestamp 2:06:49)

..searched for Victorian hats...(timestamp 2:34:25)

He had poked around London's antique shops in a vain search for Victorian-era hats and bird-filled natural history cabinets. (timestamp 2:49:37)

Victorian hats, plume smugglers, grave robbers, and, at the heart of of it all, a flute-playing thief, had been a welcome diversion from the unrelenting pressure of my work with refugees. (timestamp 5:37:12)

...birds that have been mounted on hats with outstretched wings.(timestamp 6:03:46)

...fashioned the jewels of the sky into hats. (timestamp 7:49:40)

...and the Colonial Hat Company...(timestamp 7:51:53)