Curiosities from the Cabinet features 36 museum objects including an ancient Babylonian tablet, a 21st-century webpage, a skeleton marionette and a colony of live ants, found in UK museums from Weston-super-Mare to the Shetland Islands. Over 40 people from inside and outside the museum world – curators, conservators, visitors, users, artists – talk about these objects with knowledge, passion and even tenderness.
We listen as British Museum Assyriologist Irving Finkel explains the oldest known map of the world; David Kohn of the American Museum of Natural History describes how Darwin’s weed garden contributed to On the Origin of Species; and novelist and ‘Janeite’ Cindy Jones spins her own story around Jane Austen’s writing table. This book will inform and intrigue anyone who likes visiting museums.
Table of Content
Introduction: Opening the cabinetInside the cabinet
The touchable
Quilt
St Fagans Museum
Bastet figurine
Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
Anointing spoon replica
Royal Historic Palaces online gift shop
The recreated
Casts of Parthenon Sculptures
Elgin Museum
Colossus rebuild
The National Museum of Computing
Lucifer
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
The ephemeral
Mermaid flyer
Centre for Ephemera Studies
Toilet paper
Land of Lost Content
Twitter feed
The British Library
The lethal
Mercury
Ulster Museum
Flint-lock pistols
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Euthanasia machine
Science Museum
The dead
Barn owl
Booth Museum of Natural History
Crocodile handbag
Cole Museum of Zoology
Jeremy Bentham auto-icon
University College London
The living
Leafcutter ants
Liverpool World Museum
Darwin’s weed garden
Down House
Captain Woodget
The Cutty Sark
The extinct
Quagga skeleton
Grant Museum of Zoology
Babylonian map of the world
British Museum
Bend used for peat flittin’
Fetlar Interpretive Centre
The mobile
Skeleton marionette
Victoria and Albert Museum
Wave machine
Whipple Museum of the History of Science
Brantly B2B helicopter
Helicopter Museum
The verbal
Paradise Lost
Milton’s Cottage
Wesley monument
Museum of London
Probate copy of the will of Thomas Leyland
International Slavery Museum
The domestic
Britains toy farm set
Museum of English Rural Life
Homemaker plate
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
Jane Austen’s writing table
Jane Austen’s House Museum
The huge
Coal mine
Big Pit National Coal Museum
Emigrant sailing ship
Ulster American Folk Park
Monasterboice cross
Victoria and Albert Museum
The curious
Hans Sloane’s specimen tray
British Museum
Powhatan’s mantle
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
Garden Museum
Closing the cabinet
References and further resources
List of museums
About the author
Rebecca Reynolds has worked in museum education since 2006; firstly at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and then as a visiting lecturer in Museum Studies and museum education consultant at The Museum of English Rural Life, Reading University. The core of her work is making museums and collections accessible to visitors, and developing creative and innovative ways of exploring them.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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