Nonfiction Book Club

This month, we will discuss The Feather Thief: beauty, obsession, and the natural history heist of the century by Kirk Wallace Johnson.  

Praise for this book from Eva Holland of Outside: “The best compliment I can give a nonfiction writer is that they make me care deeply about an obscure topic I would otherwise never have been interested in. That’s the case with Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief.”

The obscure topic at hand is the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying and the brazen theft–by a passionate fly-tier–of hundreds of bird skins from the Tring Museum in 2009.  Located about an hour outside of London, the Tring Museum is an outpost of the British Museum of Natural History and home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world.

Copies of this book are available at the library. 

Our discussion will be held in a hybrid format.  The host will be in person at the BFL, while some members will join over zoom.  You are welcome to join either way.  For zoom, please register here to receive the meeting details: