Lists are easy to overlook; unassuming and often ephemeral, we tend to think of them as useful in the moment and then disposable. Nature on Paper, by contrast, makes them the focus of its inquiry, arguing that “we have not been looking at them adequately—indeed, we have rarely been looking at them at all” (225). We have missed a great deal by overlooking them, writes Anne Greenwood MacKinney in this illuminating and well-written book, because lists of all kinds—catalogs, inventories, enumerations, registers, and indices among them—“not only contain but also help create entire worlds” (4). To demonstrate this, MacKinney focuses on the documentary history of natural history objects as they, and their paper trails, move between sites, agents, and institutions. The central events of her story take place in Prussia from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the Zoological Museum of the University of Berlin, established in 1810, and its director, Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein and his museum straddle a time of political and cultural transformations in which the relationship between scientists and the state, between scientific experts and the public, and between institutional frameworks and trans-imperial trade networks were all in flux. Situated at the intersection of the history of natural history, the history of the book, and the history of museum studies, Nature on Paper allows us to follow the paper trails left by collectors and officials alike and to watch those paper trails actively reshape the scientific community in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1, “The Specimen,” focuses on the scientific label and the ways in which it established multiple relationships: between a thing and its significance; between things and people, including collectors and donors; and finally between things and places, and the museum's implied access to the natural products of those places. Chapter 2 moves to “The Field” and the documentation that occurred there. Specimen registers “condensed fragment[s] of scientific experience” (94) and were thus crucial in producing the modern scientific fact, ostensibly free of subjectivity, narrowly focused, and dissected into parts. Registers constituted not only the scientific objects to which they referred but also the scholarly identity of the collector, whose disciplined production of paper attested to a rigor and exactitude that separated the expert naturalist from the simple traveler. Chapter 3 tackles “The Museum,” and the challenges faced by Lichtenstein in navigating the dual roles of academic scholar and institutional administrator. Highlighting the ways that the museum catalog grew out of the estate inventory and the need for an archive to manage the ever-increasing piles of paper that undergirded the museum, the chapter demonstrates how Lichtenstein used paper tools to bolster the reach and reputation of his institution. The institution was likewise an important part of “The State,” the subject of Chapter 4, which follows the ways in which collections became part of a larger political project wherein scientific and technical expertise were overseen and protected by the Prussian state. Finally, Chapter 5 expands outward to “The Public,” a group whose identity, boundaries, and relationship to the scientific and cultural institutions of the state were in the process of formation. Through the concept of the “duplicate” and the sales catalogs produced by Lichtenstein, MacKinney follows the ways in which the museum used paper tools to train a broad and educated public to appreciate the knowledge of nature it produced.

Ultimately, Nature on Paper is a book that uses paper tools to tell a familiar story in novel ways: the story of the professionalization of science, of the increasing entanglement of science and state, and of the rise of both the scientific expert and the scientific fact. It also convincingly urges us to take our historical paper trails seriously: they are not, MacKinney rightly insists, just leftover transcriptions of a story to which we no longer have direct access. Sometimes, they are the story. And even at times when they aren't the focus of the story we happen to be telling, we should not overlook the crucial role they had in constituting it.