Customer Reviews

Home Book of Taxidermy and Tanning

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While this book covers a lot of territory in only 160 pages, too often the author simply says for the beginner to do something with inadequate, or no, instructions. After buying this book I'm now looking for another, more textbookish book on the subject. Before passing up this book, consider that it has been around since 1969, and survived 29 printings. Also, it is one of the very few books that Amazon has in print on this subject.

The word "taxidermy" derives from two Latin terms that combine to mean something like "the ordering of skins"--as in, "to place IN order," not "to place AN order," as one might do when one wants, say, a pizza.

I highlight this distinction because my friend Neil, a remarkable hunter in his own right, recently used an inferior book on the subject of taxidermy to stuff and mount a pizza on the mantle above his fireplace. While in this particular case the mounted pizza suited the decor well (Neil's home subscribes to a kind of rustic Italian aesthetic that leans heavily on the pepperoni motif), I suspect that most aspiring taxidermists are more interested in mounting more traditional game animals such as the Kodiak bear, the bison, and the Wisconsin housecat, all of which are covered in exquisite detail by Grantz's landmark text.