For 2011: Make Your Own Cabinet of Curiosity
Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 1st, 2011
I often ask the young people and their parents who visit the International Cryptozoology Museum what they have in their own “collections.” I have found talking about “cabinets of curiosity” with kids is a way to visually have them realize their interests can be displayed on the top of their chest of drawers, a shelf, or a corner of their room. These gatherings can lend themselves to the beginnings of small, dedicated collections of natural history objects, cryptid models, and favorite mementos. From these, learning evolves.
Below is a small display at the ICM demonstrating what an old classic cabinet of curiosity looks like, physically. Of course, the entire museum is a Cabinet of Curiosity or Wonder, and in German Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer (wonder-room).
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Loren Coleman no longer writes for Cryptomundo. His archived posts remain here at Cryptomundo.
It might interest you to know, that the topmost illustration of a Cabinet of Curiosities is in fact what later became the Museum of Natural History in Copenhagen, Denmark. If you look at an enlargement of the old drawing you will see, on a shelf in the background, a treeroot that has grown around a jawbone of a deer. That can still be seen at the museum today.
I have also a small cabinet of curiosities, which I started to build already during my school time. Some of them can be seen in the bloghead of my blog “Bestiarium.”
It includes some stuffed animals, bones, skulls, feathers, fossils, shells or molluscs, minerals, insects, some fish and reptiles preserved in alcohol and some other items, for example a cast of an old scrimshaw sperm whale tooth and walrus tusk. Additionally I have a lot of self-sculpted models which fit well into a cabinet of curiosities, like models of unusual living or extinct animals and, of course, cryptids, as well as some “curiosities” like a self-made Feejee-mermaid.
SORDES – Any chance your blog will be available in English? Thanx.
Purrlcat, I don´t think so, this would be incredibly much work to translate everything. I have anyway no more that much time to blog, and sadly don´t write very often new posts. But I already wrote two guest-blog-posts here at Cryptomundo, and perhaps more will follow.
My house itself is a collection of weirdness! However my own little cabinet is an old printers press tray, turned vertical and mounted on the wall. It contains fossils, shells, skulls, feathers, curious little ornaments and odd coins. The compartments are fairly small and are almost all full now (thanks to my partner and I discovering a fossil rich beach near our home) so I may have to upgrade to a bigger cabinet! My favourite item we found is either a rabbit skull or a fossil coral, our favourite bought/given object is a semi precious stone/mineral the name of which escapes me. It is irridescent, like an oil slick, and forms geometric, right angled formations. Ours is haped like a pyramid, of course!