Jumbo [antikvár]

A Note on the Text This is not a biography of the world's most renowned elephant nor of its famed owners, the London Zoo and Phineas T. Barnum. Those things have been expertly done elsewhere, and I am grateful and indebted to them. What is offered here is, to borrow a term from the first time I 'saw the elephant' (on screen, that is), a kind of fantasia. Call it elephantasia. Acknowledgements to a number of authors whose work I have drawn on will be found in the endnotes. But, at the outset, I must express particular thanks to Paul Chambers's Jumbo: This Being the True Story of the Greatest Elephant in the World (2009). What follows here does not aim to supersede his masterly biography; my intentions are more free-ranging and egotistical. As has anyone who has opened its pages, I have been consistendy delighted and instructed by EC. Sillar and R.M. Meyler's Elephants: Ancient and Modern (1968).