Black Beauty, Practical Cats and Aslan strut their stuff, while fish are deemed less of a catch, in a new exhibition of Animal Tales at the British Library
Is it the early illustrated edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, accompanied by a droll letter from TS Eliot? The 1877 title page of Black Beauty, with Anna Sewell crediting herself as its translator “from the original equine”? Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem taunting the once wild and proud lion (“Now you’re only born in cages / In Hamburg, among the Germans”)? Or Montaigne gazing at his cat in a 1602 edition of his Essays? Each visitor to Animal Tales will have their own favourite in this free British Library exhibition about “animals on the page”, stretching all the way from Aesop and Ovid to Dolly the Sheep, Dave Eggers and Helen Macdonald.
We once lived in proximity to animals, an introductory panel declares, knowing how they were reared and relying on them for transport and clothing as well as food. Now, in contrast, they live apart from us except as pets (“we” are tacitly assumed to be urban), but “inhabit our imaginations and haunt our literature”. Animal Tales sets out some of the most enduring and compelling results of this haunting in half a dozen sections, with silhouettes of foliage and beasts as backdrop. Visiting the compact but treasure-packed exhibition in the library’s atrium gallery feels rather like going round an unusually hygienic zoo, with all the animals reduced to two dimensions and vitrines replacing cages or enclosures.
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