The Mermaid Preservative Ledger
Chemistry on the Wagon Road

About this book:

In the mud-rutted veins of the 1844 National Road, Silas Thorne wages a quiet war against entropy. As the resident chemist and preservationist for Van Amburgh's Travelling Menagerie, he tends the impossible: a Feejee mermaid stitched from monkey and salmon, a two-headed lamb floating in cloudy spirits, a tiger coughing its life out in an iron cage. Armed with a pigskin ledger, a wagon-load of arsenic, alum, and coal-tar distillate, and a ruthless understanding of how flesh fails, Silas fights humidity, vibration, and ignorance to keep the curiosities intact—and the show profitable—one mile at a time.

From the formaldehyde stink of the sideshow tent to the coal-oil reek of his mobile laboratory, *The Mermaid Preservative Ledger* immerses you in a vanished America where science wears a showman's coat and every specimen has a secret. Silas moves through a world of barkers and freedmen, gasworks managers and drunken apothecaries, solving the chemistry of survival with a steel pen and a steady hand. Each chapter is a formula tested on the road: copperas for the prairie, glycerin for the gilded bones, carbolic whispers against the dark.

Part historical thriller, part macabre road novel, this is a story stitched from salt and scale, formaldehyde and feathers—the anatomy of a hoax preserved in glorious, gritty detail. If you've ever wondered what it takes to keep a miracle from rotting before the next paying crowd arrives, climb aboard. The wagon leaves at dawn.