The Father of Cryptozoology...

I am still hip deep in cataloguing a bunch of books for a colleague who’s going to the Sydney Rare Book Fair at the end of October. Working my way through the material I unearthed this gem and immediately had some X-Files flashbacks.

Bernard Heuvelmans (Introduction by Gerald Durrell; Richard Garnett, trans.; Monique Watteau, illus.), On the Track of Unknown Animals, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1959.

Second impression: octavo; hardcover, full cloth with gilt spine titles; 558pp., top edges dyed black, with a monochrome frontispiece, 30 plates and many illustrations likewise. Minor wear; a little shaken; text block edges spotted, top edge dusted; offset to the endpapers; spotting to the preliminaries and around the plates. Price-clipped dustwrapper is rubbed and edgeworn with a few marks; spine panel sunned and extremities lightly chipped; now professionally protected by non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good.

Bernard Heuvelmans is considered to be the “Father of Cryptozoology” due mostly to the release of this book. It’s a loose piece of wishful thinking that establishes itself on the premise that, if we can re-discover some creatures that were thought extinct, then might there not be more such critters out there that we haven’t spotted yet? He then takes the next step – taking a line from Charles Fort – that perhaps we are seeing relict animals in the wild, it’s just that tales about them are taken as myths, or folklore, and are being discredited out of hand by the scientific community. At the time of his writing, the Coelacanth had been found and the Komodo Dragon had just been identified, so Heuvelmans decided that a wholesale revision of the animal kingdom’s catalogue was warranted.

What follows between these covers is part truth and part pixie-dust. Heuvelmans roams the planet creating ‘what if…?’ scenarios to cover a range of beasts, and their possible survival, with whimsical drawings and dreamy prose. He covers giant humanoids, sea serpents, riverine monsters, mermaids, and a whole slew of the cryptid animalia which populates the tabloid newspaper realm. Here’s a particularly relevant section concerning the Mythos:

Other plates show the infamous yeti scalp of the Pangboche Monastery which has been repeatedly debunked as being stitched together from yak remains, but I’m particularly enamoured of the sketch that introduces this section. While claiming to be a “reconstruction based upon all available evidence”, it displays more storytime drama and whimsy than it does scientific accuracy. Wherever photographic detail is not available, Heuvelmans turns to this type of fantasy to push his ideas.

And sometimes he tries to sell the reader an outright fake. The frontispiece of the text contains the following image:

It’s not clear whether Heuvelmans was behind this faked image or if he’s been duped along with many others. The issue here is that this is not a man-sized anthropoid photographed after being shot by big game hunters in the jungle. It is in fact a spider monkey, propped up on a footlocker by means of a twig and relying on an absence of scale references to sell the picture as some kind of Bigfoot creature. The original, uncropped, image can be found floating about and clearly shows that this poor mishandled beast was probably only two-feet tall at best, when seen with its slayers standing nearby. Heuvelmans – to give him the benefit of the doubt – obviously believed that the image was real, or he wouldn’t have been so brazen as to stick it at the start of his book; the fact that he got someone of the standing of Gerald Durrell to pen an Introduction to the work shows that maybe he wasn’t alone in having been fooled. Unless, of course, he did know and just didn’t care – a lot of shonkery was possible in pre-Internet days.

In the final analysis, this book shows that, in the 1950s through to the 1980s, a lot of pseudo-scientific publishing appeared and much of it was coming from Europe. It seems that, having been translated from French or German, such works developed a kind of legitimate sheen for the English-speaking market: ‘Well, golly! If they took the trouble to translate it, it must be real!’ This is the case with Erich von Däniken, Marcel F. Homet and, whether by accident or design, Bernard Heuvelmans. This phenomenon isn’t new: in Victorian days, evangelical Creationist preachers and astrological doomsayers used to gain credence simply by putting their assertions into print; the ‘translation cachet’ (if we can call it that) is simply the extension of an old game. In the final analysis, what we’re seeing here are publishers making bank, not any kind of scientific rigour.

And certainly, Heuvelmans wasn’t afraid of raking in cash, given that he released a sequel soon afterwards:

Bernard Heuvelmans (Richard Garnett, trans.; Alika Watteau, illus.), In the Wake of Sea-Serpents, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1968.

First English edition: octavo; hardcover, full cloth with gilt spine titles; 645pp., with 32 monochrome plates, maps and many illustrations likewise. Minor wear; a little shaken; text block edges spotted with some minor marks; top edge dusted; light offset to the endpapers. Price-clipped dustwrapper is rubbed and edgeworn with a few minor marks; now professionally protected by non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good.

In this follow-up, he narrows his focus to marine cryptids and lake monsters, combing through the available legendry and fuzzy photos while berating the scientific community for trampling the evidence in their haste to disprove what everyone obviously – obviously! – knows to be true. It’s a subtle and slightly bewildering little mental two-step process that’s as fascinating to read as it is infuriating.

*****

Copies of both these works are available, print-on-demand, through all the usual outlets, and occasionally a diligent rummager might turn up a secondhand version. If you are interested in either of the two volumes presented here, get in touch and I will point you in the direction of my colleague who has them for sale.