Formation

The Society for Improbable Discoveries was founded in 1878 by A. Merrick Ashby, a naturalist and private collector of independent means and unusually well-placed connections in the industrial and mercantile houses of America and Europe. The late nineteenth century was the great Age of Expedition — of museums built faster than they could be filled, of collectors underwriting excavations from Egypt to Patagonia, of specimens and antiquities crossing oceans by the shipload. Ashby moved easily in that world, and it was from within it, over the better part of a decade, that he watched specimens begin to disappear. Explorers, collectors, and men of science of his acquaintance delivered their findings to the national museums and learned institutions of the day only to find, upon later inquiry, that many of the specimens were not on display, not in study collections, not in transit, and not, according to the receiving institutions, ever received at all. Whether through embarrassment, politics, institutional caution, or motives less easily categorized, the result was much the same. Ashby never concluded there was a single hand at work, only a remarkably consistent outcome, and therefore reached the conclusion, first reluctantly and then permanently, that if the official record would not accommodate certain evidence, a second record would have to be kept.

Ashby's solution was characteristically practical. He did not write letters of protest, and he did not go to the press. He gathered, instead, a small circle of like-minded collectors — men whose own crates had gone astray, whose accounts had been politely disbelieved, or who had simply seen enough to be uneasy — and proposed that they undertake, at their own expense and under their own discretion, the work the institutions would not. The Society would recover and preserve the true historical record. It would not publish its holdings, endorse them, or explain them.

The Archive

The founding members of the Society were, by design, well-placed. They sat on acquisition committees, corresponded with expedition leaders, underwrote passages, and knew the shipping agents by name. A specimen that a museum was likely to decline could be quietly redirected before it ever arrived; an account an institution would not entertain could find a more receptive correspondent; a crate whose contents were about to become inconvenient could be recatalogued, rerouted, or received on the Society's behalf by an obliging party at the dock. The work was neither theft nor rescue in any dramatic sense. It was, in the main, a matter of the right letter reaching the right desk a day before the wrong one.

In this manner, the Archive grew. It existed not to prove anything, but to ensure that nothing capable of proof was ever again lost to convenience.

The Sunset Provision

The Archive's holdings remain closed. They are not, however, closed indefinitely. Among the provisions of the Society's Charter of Formation and Operating Principles, Article V — known within the Society as the Sunset Provision — establishes that a holding shall pass out of the Archive and into private custodianship once every person named in its recovery is deceased, and three further generations have passed. The founders' reasoning is not recorded in full, but the shape of it is plain enough: a record kept forever in secret is indistinguishable from a record destroyed, and the men who founded the Society had reason to distrust the alternative. The Provision is obscure, inconvenient, and binding. The Society honors it precisely. It is by this mechanism, and no other, that materials from the Archive now reach the public at all.

Public Custodianship

For most of its history, the Society did not recruit. Membership was a matter of quiet introduction, and the roster was never published — a discretion the founders considered essential to the work and their successors saw no reason to abandon. That posture is now, of necessity, changing. The Sunset Provision has released a substantial portion of the Archive into eligibility for private custodianship, and a holding cannot be placed with a custodian who does not exist. The Society is therefore, for the first time in its history, extending an open invitation. Membership begins with acknowledgement, then acquisition: a released holding, formally placed, and the responsibilities of preservation that attend it. What follows from there is a matter between the Society and the member.

The Society's Archive includes recovered records concerning unexplained historical events, unusual archaeological discoveries, mysterious artifacts, cryptids, forgotten expeditions, folklore, and other inopportune chapters of history.

Society does not itself conduct commerce; it never has. The passage of released holdings into the hands of their new members is handled on its behalf by Taboo & Company, a small studio of some standing in the trade of oddities and curiosities, chosen for its discretion, its independence from institutional interests, and its founder's evident willingness to be useful without asking too many questions. Taboo & Company has agreed to handle Society materials through its imprint, the Inconvenient Atlas. The Society itself makes no announcements. Time, per its motto, will do the revealing.