Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinet of Curiosities PDF Author: Gordon Grice
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
ISBN: 0761189378
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
Exactly the book for every young explorer who loves finding stuff in nature and bringing it home. Cabinet of Curiosities is a lavishly illustrated introduction to the wonders of natural history and the joys of being an amateur scientist and collector. Nature writer Gordon Grice, who started his first cabinet of curiosities at age six when he found a skunk’s skull, explains how scientists classify all living things through the Linnaeus system; how to tell real gold from fool’s gold; how to preserve butterflies, crab shells, feathers, a robin’s egg, spider specimens, and honeycombs; how to identify seashells; the difference between antlers and horns; how to read animal tracks. And then, what to do with your specimens, including how to build a cabinet of curiosities out of common household objects, like a desk organizer or a box for fishing tackle.

Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities

Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities PDF Author: Janelle A. Schwartz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527553388
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Interdisciplinary Study asks its readers to enter into an investigation of the nature of collecting as an aesthetic exercise. Spanning the sixteenth century through today, this book gathers together the work of current scholars to re-envision the task of collectors and their collections in broad strokes. Each chapter appropriates the idea of a cabinet of curiosity in order to expand its boundaries of meaning and to complicate our understanding of the acts of display and observation. These chapters also demonstrate that collecting is a universal trope which nevertheless depends on time and place for its particular expressions. Whether the collection is made up of literary texts and criticism, visual art, including mechanical reproductions, taxidermy and photography, historical travelogues, museum exhibitions, blockbuster films, or airline in-flight briefing cards, it conveys an urgent relevance to our consumer age, in which information is abundant and attention is a commodity.

The Curiosities

The Curiosities PDF Author: Brenna Yovanoff
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab ?
ISBN: 1467716235
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
From acclaimed and New York Times bestselling YA authors Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff comes The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories. ? A vampire locked in a cage in the basement, for good luck. ? Bad guys, clever girls, and the various reasons why the guys have to stop breathing. ? A world where fires never go out (with references to vanilla ice cream). These are but a few of the curiosities collected in this volume of short stories by three acclaimed practitioners of paranormal fiction. But The Curiosities is more than the stories. Since 2008, Maggie, Tessa, and Brenna have posted more than 250 works of short fiction to their website www.merryfates.com. Their goal was simple: create a space for experimentation and improvisation in their writing?all in public and without a backspace key. In that spirit, The Curiosities includes the stories and each author's comments, critiques, and kudos in the margins. Think of it as a guided tour of the creative processes of three acclaimed authors.

Morbid Curiosities

Morbid Curiosities PDF Author: Paul Gambino
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 139961522X
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
A fascinating insight into the strange world of collectors of the macabre, Morbid Curiosities features 18 unique collections and an extensive interview with each collector, explaining how and why they collect, and showcasing the most remarkable pieces from each collection. The collections include skulls, mummified body parts, taxidermy, occult objects and various carnival, and side-show and criminal ephemera. Detailed captions tell the curious stories behind each object, many of which are being shown outside the private world of their collections for the first time. Morbid Curiosities includes stunning, specially commissioned photography of both the individual objects and the context of how the collector exhibits their work, forming a unique showcase of the bizarre and the intriguing.

Curiosities of Collecting

Curiosities of Collecting PDF Author: Indiana University Regional Campus Hoosier Folklore Conference (South Bend, Ind)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages : 38

Book Description


Collecting the World

Collecting the World PDF Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 9780674237483
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
Winner of the Leo Gershoy Award Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize A Times Book of the Week When the British Museum opened its doors in 1759, it was the first free national public museum in the world. Collecting the World tells the story of the eccentric collector whose thirst for universal knowledge brought it into being. A man of insatiable curiosity and wide-ranging interests, Hans Sloane assembled a collection of antiquities, oddities, and artifacts from around the British Empire to form the most famous cabinet of curiosities of its time. With few curbs on his passion, he established a network of agents to supply him with objects from China, India, the Caribbean, and beyond. Wampum beads, rare manuscripts, a shoe made of human skin: nothing was off limits. The first biography of Sloane based on his complete writings, Collecting the World portrays one of the Enlightenment's most original luminaries. "A magnificent scholarly coup and an enthralling read... It conveys the excitement of original research as well as the thrill of tracking exotic curiosities to their source." --Sunday Times "Delbourgo's engrossing new biography situates Sloane within the welter of intellectual and political crosscurrents that marked his times." --New York Times Book Review "A superb biography--humane, judicious and as passionately curious as Sloane himself." --Times Literary Supplement "A superb book, enjoyably written, beautifully illustrated, and based on deep knowledge of the sources." --The Telegraph

Curiosities and Texts

Curiosities and Texts PDF Author: Marjorie Swann
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203178
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
A craze for collecting swept England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aristocrats and middling-sort men alike crammed their homes full of a bewildering variety of physical objects: antique coins, scientific instruments, minerals, mummified corpses, zoological specimens, plants, ethnographic objects from Asia and the Americas, statues, portraits. Why were these bizarre jumbles of artifacts so popular? In Curiosities and Texts, Marjorie Swann demonstrates that collections of physical objects were central to early modern English literature and culture. Swann examines the famous collection of rarities assembled by the Tradescant family; the development of English natural history; narrative catalogs of English landscape features that began to appear in the Tudor and Stuart periods; the writings of Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick; and the foundation of the British Museum. Through this wide-ranging series of case studies, Swann addresses two important questions: How was the collection, which was understood as a form of cultural capital, appropriated in early modern England to construct new social selves and modes of subjectivity? And how did literary texts—both as material objects and as vehicles of representation—participate in the process of negotiating the cultural significance of collectors and collecting? Crafting her unique argument with a balance of detail and insight, Swann sheds new light on material culture's relationship to literature, social authority, and personal identity.

Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance

Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance PDF Author: Julius von Schlosser
Publisher: Getty Research Institute
ISBN: 160606679X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
For the first time, the pioneering book that launched the study of art and curiosity cabinets is available in English. Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance) is a seminal work in the history of art and collecting. Originally published in German in 1908, it was the first study to interpret sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of wonder as precursors to the modern museum, situating them within a history of collecting going back to Greco-Roman antiquity. In its comparative approach and broad geographical scope, Schlosser’s book introduced an interdisciplinary and global perspective to the study of art and material culture, laying the foundation for museum studies and the history of collections. Schlosser was an Austrian professor, curator, museum director, and leading figure of the Vienna School of art history whose work has not achieved the prominence of his contemporaries until now. This eloquent and informed translation is preceded by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s substantial introduction. Tracing Schlosser’s biography and intellectual formation in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, it contextualizes his work among that of his contemporaries, offering a wealth of insights along the way.

A Collection of Curiosities

A Collection of Curiosities PDF Author: Alice Cantrell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781702388566
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 102

Book Description
An 8x10 sketchbook (for all ages!) for illustrating your own personal collection of curiosities! The pages of this perfect-bound (think coloring book) sketchbook are printed on a very nice 55 lb paper, but markers and paint WILL bleed through. Good old pencils and color pencils are the way to go! There is a brief history of curious collections and a "How to Use this Book" page, and then 98 pages of frames and containers with labels ready to be filled with your child's creativity. A Bit of History People have been collecting interesting objects and pieces of the natural world since the days of ancient Rome when the temples were used to house various treasures gathered from the far corners of the Roman Empire. In the 1400s, European explorers began to venture further beyond their borders as they entered what we now call the "Age of Exploration" (from the 1400s through the 1600s). On their travels, they collected samples from the new (to them) lands and when they returned, displayed them in "cabinets" (Which were small rooms, not the things with shelves and doors we think of now.) for all to view. These collections ranged from small ones that could be contained in a box or a cabinet to enormous collections that filled whole rooms (often called "wonder-rooms").

Collecting in a Consumer Society

Collecting in a Consumer Society PDF Author: Russell W. Belk
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415105347
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
"With a new preface, this new paperback edition outlines the history of museum collecting from ancient civilizations to the present. It also looks at aspects of consumer culture - advertising, department stores, mass merchandising, consumer desire, and how this relates to the activity of collecting." --Book Jacket.