Image: Jan van Kessel, Art Room with a Woman in Front of a Mirror (1626)
The Cabinet of Curiosities
(Disclaimer: This is my bookstore. I make money if you buy these books from Golden Bough. So please do).
One of my favorite places in all of London is the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art, and Natural History. If you're lucky enough to visit, you will enter through the Last Tuesday Society and Absinthe Parlour, which is surely one of the spookiest bars on earth. Next you can venture down the narrow staircase into the museum itself. Here in a dim basement overflowing with incredible relics you will find a true grotesquerie of oddities - the ultimate in cabinets of curiosity. Of particular note: The Cabinet of Monsters, which the museum describes as the "largest display of animal monsters in the UK." On your way out, stop in at the Absinthe Parlour for a Corpse Reviver (my personal favorite spooky cocktail) or one of their other amazing concoctions and enjoy the bizarre collection of taxidermy and art on red, velvet-lined seating. Highly recommend that you hit the museum first, as you may not want to climb up and down those stairs post-cocktail. (Fun fact: the Corpse Reviver was was first developed in the mid-nineteenth century to deal with hangovers. I would not endorse this hair-of-the-dog method today, however).
The Wynd Museum is a true homage to the traditional Cabinet of Curiosities. The Cabinet arose during the Renaissance to highlight ogle-worthy items that didn't quite belong anywhere else. These displays acted as precursors to the modern museum and often housed art collections, as in the Jan van Kessel painting above. But while museums pride themselves on a high degree of organization and contextualization, the Cabinet of Curiosities prides itself on resplendent mystery and variety. Not everything needs a place, not everything needs an explanation. There is poetry in the overflowing display of oddities that blur the lines between myth and reality. It is a rejection of mundanity in which the only real requirement is that everything must be special or strange.
Coffee Table Books
If you want to step into the Cabinet today, you're in luck. Golden Bough's virtual shelves house some amazingly curious works.
For the real cabinet experience, I'd recommend starting with Edward Brooke-Hitching's two fantastic collections, The Madman's Library and The Madman's Gallery.
Brooke-Hitchings has written extensively on weird artifacts and these two companion books show him at his best. These books are a visual feast, packed with beautiful color photographs of some of the world's most bizarre specimens of art and books ever compiled. "Doom paintings" of the middle ages that adorn cathedral walls and implore repentance. The Renaissance-era Wound Man – a tragic figure pierced with swords and spears who served as a reference for practitioners of the healing arts. Books written in blood. And, of course, Hieronymus Bosch's iconic and horrifying Garden of Earthly Delights.
If, like me, you love a good coffee table book, especially when it offers a visual exploration into the historic macabre, these books are for you. Prepare to be delighted.
You've purchased the Brooke-Hitchings pair but they seem a little lonely on your coffee table.
Enter The Witch's Door. I'm obsessed with a good flea market. The one weekend I ever spent in Paris, I skipped the Louvre and checked out three types of places: cathedrals, cemeteries, and, of course, the Paris Flea Market. I drooled over some stunning rare copies of Jules Verne books but I was broke so at 200 euros they were simply out of my price range. (I was traveling on a research grant, okay?) I did come away with a few old pocket watches with exposed gears that I strung on a chain to make a necklace. So I am thrilled that Ryan Matthew Cohn and Regina M. Rossi released The Witch's Door. The two are the founders of the Oddities Flea Market – a modern-day Cabinet of Curiosities but one where you can buy things. (Find them in a city near you!) I'm sorry to say I have not yet made it to Oddities, but it is high on the list. The Witch's Door highlights some of the weirdest things to ever cross the pair's path. An ogler's paradise.History and Archives
Maybe you're looking for something a little less coffee table and a little more more scholarly. In that case, you should check out Megan Rosenbloom's Dark Archives. Where the three previous books offer a visual spectacle, Rosenbloom takes a more academic bent. A librarian, Rosenbloom guides the reader through the fascinating history of books bound in human skin. Yes, this was a real thing. I especially love Dark Archives as a Curiosity book because it brings together grotesquerie and biology – a pairing right at home in the natural history displays of the original Cabinets. What's more, Rosenbloom gets deep into the ethics of this exploration. If you're slightly disturbed by your own fascination with macabre ogling, this book is a great place to think through those feelings and grapple with some very real ethical concerns.
If Dark Archives is your jam, you should really consider The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine. I'm more than a little obsessed with the history of medicine. What an astoundingly gruesome field! And Thomas Morris does it justice in this collection of some of the weirdest stories from the archives of medical history. Like Rosenbloom, Morris conducted significant archival research to compile this collection. I especially appreciate Morris's respect of medical practitioners of yore. While so many books on the history of science (and especially medicine) take something of a mocking tone towards the now-debunked theories of the past, Morris points out that these were still intelligent people working with limited resources in a different worldview. It's always a great lesson to keep in mind when studying the history of science.
Fictional Cabinets
There is one fiction book in the collection – The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black by E. B. Hudspeth. I hesitated to include it because it's such a convincing imitation of nonfiction. But it's so aligned with some of the other books on this list and it is such a cool find that I simply couldn't help myself. (Plus Erin Morgenstern, renowned author of The Night Circus which you will find on sale in our At the Circus collection, calls it a Cabinet of Curiosities in her blurb for it. Yes, that was a shameless plug for another book I sell). If you're not familiar, resurrectionists were people who exhumed corpses to sell to anatomists for study in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.
Hudspeth presents a very real-sounding biography of a fictional doctor obsessed with his weird scientific theories, much like Dr. Frankenstein. The biography is followed by an appendix of illustrations attributed to the fictional doctor, but actually drawn by Hudspeth. These fantastic and fantastical images could easily find a home in The Madman's Gallery or any number of works that glorify illustrated oddities and myths of the past. Seriously, check out this book for the illustrations, if nothing else.
Other Book Recommendations
Two other books in the collection deserve at least a mention here, thought I won't go into great detail. Kate Summerscale's Book of Phobias and Manias offers an astounding encyclopedia of 99 phobias and manias. If you have ever wondered about your strange and irrational fear of amphibians, this is your book. (Honestly, you're probably afraid of or obsessed with something, amphibians or not, so it's your book too). Second, J. W. Ocker's Cursed Objects: Strange but True Stories of the World's Most Infamous Items highlights Ocker's deftness for collecting the stories that define us. (Check out his book on cryptids, too. And stay tuned for a cryptid collection). Here he compiles a wondrous cabinet of museum pieces and other oddities from around the world associated with magic – a true ode to the spirit of the Cabinet collection.
Stickers!!
Last but certainly not least, take a break from all this reading with two amazing sticker books (here and here). Perhaps nowhere in the collection can you find a more fitting example of the true spirit of curious cabinets – an overflowing array of unusual miscellany with little to no explanation or organization. Such things need not be catalogued to enchant.
View the whole collection!
Sincerely yours,
Proprietress-in-Chief