Have you met the man who walks upside down? The guano mummy? The disembodied singing head of Anthropoglossos? You will. Whenever a mysterious oddity arrived in Victorian London, readers knew there was one man they could rely on being at the scene: Frank Buckland. A barrel-chested surgeon chomping an ever-present cigar, Buckland was one of the most outsized eccentrics of his time—a naturalist who seriously proposed kangaroo-and yak-ranching in England, and a raconteur whose London home was filled with a freakish array of stuffed animals, grinning skulls, and an all-too-alive gang of monkeys who snatched food off visitors’ dinner plates.

Rescued after a century of obscurity, and culled from thousands of pages of Buckland’s eyewitness accounts, Curious Men brings back to life eighteen tales from one of the most curious men of all.