Men's Weird Collections Inspired the Modern Museum: Cabinets of Curiosities

I'm always charmed by museums that feel like this sort of "weird collection". The trend seems to be firmly away from it, however. During the time I lived in London, the Horniman museum reorganized itself and became "respectible" in the process. While I was living in Exeter the RAMM did the same thing. If you have a similar taste, I strongly recommend visiting the Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford: it's a truly bizarre collection of absolutely amazing objects - or it was the last time I was there; if it's since been re-curated along modern lines, then you'll have missed a uniquely odd experience.

If you're ever in LA (Culver City), see if you can get into The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Some things are well documented, if not believable.

https://www.mjt.org/themainpage/main2.html

There must be something instinctive about collecting oddities, or perhaps it's a social aspect of extream curiousity, where after examining an object, a desire to get another opinion, requires storing the object, and so it begins. A friend who has turned pro, makes his living partialy through the buying and selling of oddities, often whole collections that are bieng sold/disposed of by exasperated relatives, his pragmatic approach to his own desire to have things he calls "catch and release", and so getting to enjoy some interesting thing, but sell it forward, and aquire the next item. It is a wierd world though, as many people develope specific fetishes and kinks around objects , or just simpler less troublesome obsessions, and then of course movie people, decorators, advertisers, artists, bibliophiles, etc.

If you're in London, check out John Soane's museum. And then, on the other side of the square, the Hunterian museum where the original collection has been presented in a more modern style. Some Hunterian artifacts turned out to be useful in the development of modern medical artifacts. Soane's gives you an experience closer to the original. Hunterian shows the evolution described in the article.

The pathological museum in Vienna (also called "Narrenturm" because it used to be an asylum) has a section with actual historic curiosity cabinets. It's a very interesting museum to visit, but it's not for the faint of heart. They have a paramedic on site because visitors regularly get sick :-D

Nice! I have this little corner in my home where I keep some stones from the Via Appia in Rome, some meteorite (or dinosaur dung, I still don't know) that my aunt found in some desert in Israel, a buddha elephant that my sister brought from India, and the mundane but funny Eiffel tower that I bought on the streets in Paris (I know, it's for tourists, but I have promised myself for years to buy one of these the next visit).

Last year, without asking, my family bought some small stuffed creature (taxidermy?) from a store. It's a flying dragon in a nice picture frame and it's still so weird to look at it.

From this moment on I call this corner my curiosity cabinet (rariteitenkabinet, in Dutch) and I'm looking forward to the next strange or exotic thing that I can add to the collection.

There was an episode of the Connections reboot (can’t remember which one) that mentioned this.

https://curiositystream.com/connections/index.html

Slightly off topic but if you are looking for a cabinet of curiosities for aircraft, visit the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, California. It has a collection that includes some truly marvelous flying machines.

My favorite is a collapsible helicopter that folds up into a duffel bag for transport. [0] It was designed to be airdropped to pilots downed behind enemy lines. The pilot was meant to assemble it and fly back to safety. It could fly but not well enough to see actual service in combat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_ROE_Rotorcycle