Cassandre Maxwell

Beautiful realistic paper-cutout illustrations accompany this story of the life of the man who loved animals as a child, and grew up to become the director of the London Zoo for 38 years, from 1859-1897. Abraham Dee Bartlett introduced better ways to care for animals, how to create natural enclosures and eliminate cages, how to give wild animals a balanced diet, and other at-the-time groundbreaking practices for humane zookeeping. He came up with the idea to post signs with information about the animals for visitors to learn about the animal' habitat, food, etc. (a radical idea in the early days of just putting an animal in a cage and having people stare at it, with only the name of the animal on a sign). As a child, he was self-taught, would read books on everything that interested him; he worked at a natural history museum doing taxidermy and his excellent work there caught the attention of the London Zoo trustees. He preferred working with live animals anyway! This picture book gives a short bibliography and timeline. Lovely picture book for younger readers; loved the endpapers with quotations and anecdotes from books about the London Zoo (sources given but very tiny on the CIP page)--for example, when the reptile house opened, it was the first one in the world, but only heated by stoves, so the reptiles were given woolen blankets for warmth!!… (altro)