In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty Year Affair By Matthew Oates, book review

Butterfly collectors have often been seen as the 'creepy janitor' figures of the natural history world, eccentric loners whose compulsive capturing and cataloguing is a shorthand for psychopathy. Frederick Clegg in John Fowles' The Collector, J in Jose Manuel Prieto's Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, Ben Parkinson in Carla Lane's Butterflies, the nameless groupie in Paul Weller's song The Butterfly Collector: these are but a few examples from a modern era which, if anything, has been kinder to lepidopterists. Back in the early 19th century, they were so ridiculed that guidebooks warned them to expect jeers should they venture out with their nets in public.