Specimen Catalogue · Members' Register · Trading Ledger — opened in this Year of Our Lord 1885, and kept current since.
Meetings every second Thursday at half past seven, upstairs above Voss & Sons Hardware on Mill Street. New collectors warmly welcome — bring a specimen, finished or unfinished, and we shall help with it.
Five regular collectors keep the Society's cabinet at present, with one corresponding member visiting on the equinox and solstice quarters. Every member shares freely; every specimen below was prepared by the named hand.
Every specimen exchanged at meeting or by post is noted here, with both collectors' assent. Valuation is informal — a courtesy for parity, not a market price.
Entries below are added to the cabinet immediately above. The ledger keeps your hand local to this register; no entry is shared until the next meeting.
An excerpt from the Society's well-thumbed reference shelf — printed by Pollard & Sons, Albany, 1881 — paired with a letter received this spring from our corresponding member Mr. Geo. Hutchins.
Dear Riverside friends,
You ask whether the labour of preparation grows tedious. I confess it does not. After forty years of pins and boards, I find the work more absorbing than at the beginning. There is a moment — when the wings have settled truly square against the cork, and the antennae have been coaxed forward, and the label is dry — when the specimen seems to compose itself into a small permanent thing. The insect was alive in the field; it is alive in a different way now, on the pin. To prepare a specimen well is not to embalm it. It is to set it down carefully into the record, where it may speak to collectors fifty years from now whose names we will never know.
I held a Cecropia this morning that I caught at lamp-light in 1853. Its scales are intact. Its colours have only deepened. The label in my own younger hand still reads true. This, I believe, is what we are doing — not collecting curios, but stewarding small lives into a longer kind of attention. May your boards dry true, your antennae cooperate, and your labels survive your handwriting.
— Geo. Hutchins, Albany, this April