Remembering Desmond Morris (and, the only time anyone has a good story about obtaining copyright permission for reusing an image in a publication)
Desmond Morris was a zoologist, surrealist painter, and his website is the best of what the internet looked like in the late 1990s. I was a teenager who purchased weird books from charity shops and remember reading The Naked Ape, his somewhat creative interpretation of human behaviour through the lens of primatology, which I'm sure is not the weirdest second hand book I read, but it was certainly one I remembered.
The Morris book I've returned to more than any other (and there are more than 100) is Gestures: Their Origins and Distributions, which he was lead author on with three other colleagues. I have multiple copies of the UK version, a copy of the US version and a version in Italian. I'm not sure why I have the Italian version, I just thought it was fun.
Gestures is, more than 45 years after publication, still one of the most comprehensive documentary projects about gesture use - surveying participants in 40 cities across 25 countries about the use of 20 different emblem gestures. I still constantly have reason to cite it.
One place I've cited it is in an upcoming handbook chapter. I wanted to talk about the geographic distribution of emblem gestures, and how they open are distributed in ways that don't match national boundaries, but reflect historical cultural contact. Gestures has some beautiful maps that illustrate this for Europe and I decided to include one. I wrote the draft a while ago, but at the start of the year the handbook moved into production and I got told it was time to figure out permissions for reusing the map from the book.
I spent a couple of hours poking around, figuring out that the old publisher Jonathan Cape's permissions are now managed by Penguin Random House. I found their form, filled in what I could and wondered if I'd hear back in time and wondering what I might be able to do if I didn't get permission.
A week or two later, a very apologetic member of the PRH team emailed me to say they no longer held the rights to that book and they had sent the request on to the person they had reverted to. Later that day I got an email from Desmond Morris himself, saying he was so delighted to get the request and happy for me to use the map (stay tuned for this publication!).
To be completely honestly never thought that Desmond Morris was actually a real human who spent time on email and would be interested to hear from me about a book he worked on over four decades ago. It's kind of like wanting to use a Beatles track and when you write to get permission Paul McCartney writes back and says "cool, yeah go for it!".
I had a lovely back and forth with Morris over a couple of weeks, we discussed Aussie Rules Football (which he was introduced to during a trip to Australia), and the story of how some of the production of Gestures came together. Desmond Morris passed away on the 19th of April 2026. I am grateful that this unexpected administrative adventure gave me the opportunity to thank him for writing a book that has been so influential to my work.
