“Did you see the ceiling?” I asked my friend Sam.
Sam shrugged and walked back to the little alcove by which I was standing. He leaned inside the alcove and looked up. His eyes got wide. “Whoa!”
The entire ceiling was plastered with owls. Eyes, beaks and all the body feathers.
Imagine five owls had fallen upside from a great distance onto the ceiling, splatted and become entirely flat. The owls now stick there, waiting day after day for people to look up and notice them.
That’s just one of the curiosities at the Museum of Hunting and Nature in Paris.
I’m staying in Paris for a few days.
My three friends, all Americans, all independently heard recommendations for the Museum of Hunting and Nature.
There might be a worthwhile marketing study there — how to stand out in an immensely crowded marketplace, when surrounded with competitors with much more money, authority, experience, market share, and resources than you will ever have.
The Museum of Hunting is a strange mix of art and natural history.
There’s the owl-covered ceiling. There’s the paintings of dogs hunting from the 18th century. There’s the installation of a little wooden shack, filled with books, and covered with black feathers. There’s the taxidermied baby elephant. There’s the instructional video on methods of falconry.
And then, of course, there is the unicorn room.
In the unicorn room are specimens of the magical. A large ostrich egg in a jeweled display case. Two rhinoceros horns encased in gold. And in the dark, by the window, a genuine, 6-foot-long unicorn horn, mounted on a statue of a horse’s head to show how it looked in real life as the unicorn proudly walked through its enchanted forest home.
If you’re feeling a little disoriented right now, and wondering whether I’ve gone off the rails, let me say there is a chance it’s not a real unicorn horn. Rather, there is a chance it’s actually the canine tooth of a narwhal, a medium-sized whale that lives in Arctic waters.
Back in medieval times, and well after also, narwhal teeth were often peddled for many times their weight in gold as genuine unicorn horns. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth was gifted one worth 10,000 pounds sterling — the going price for a castle at the time.
What can I tell you? People believe in magic.
They believed it in the middle ages, in the 16th century, and even today. Has the unicorn disappeared from our consciousness now that we’ve catalogued the world’s animals and failed to find one? If anything, the unicorn is hotter than ever.
It’s worth ruminating on that. But I won’t spoil the magic here by continuing to yap on into actual marketing advice.
Instead, I will only tell you about a unicorn-like land creature, with magical powers and mystical origins. It’s been known since ancient times but only recently have scientists correctly identified, catalogued, and named it. The scientific name is Nuntium aureum v. electricum, but it’s popularly known as the Most Valuable Email.
If you’d like to get a peek at this strange and wondrous beast, pull back the curtain below and look inside, if you dare: