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.

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").

Passionate Curiosities explores the collections held in the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology through the lens of the people whose intellectual interests, financial backing, and social networks brought artifacts to Ann Arbor from the 1880s to the 1990s. Through purchases and expeditions, these individuals shaped the Museum's internationally recognized antiquities from the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, North Africa, Egypt, and the Near East, extensive photographic documentation of these regions from the early 1900s, and significant assemblages of early Christian and Islamic visual culture. An intriguing array of personalities--from archaeologists, missionaries, and diplomats to industrialists, bankrollers, and inventors--weave through these pages. They include Ernst Herzfeld, the eminent Orientalist who helped forge antiquities legislation in Iran; Luigi Cesnola, the rapacious harvester of Cypriot sites; Esther Van Deman, the pioneering feminist and scholar of Roman construction techniques; and Samuel Goudsmit, the renowned nuclear physicist and avid Egyptologist. World-famous dealers who established standards in antiquities connoisseurship likewise populate these sagas. Readers will encounter Edgar J. Banks, a swashbuckling purveyor of Mesopotamian antiquities and entrepreneur of biblical documentary films; Maurice Nahman, the "lion of Cairo"; and the colorful members of the Tano dealer dynasty in Egypt. This copiously illustrated book will interest general readers as well as scholars curious about the holdings of the Kelsey, early collectors and dealers, and the history of museums.

First Published in 2002. A History of Curiosity examines the early methodology of anthropological and social research from a critical­historical perspective. The three principal methods of research, travel, the survey and the collection of significant objects, are studied in the context of the social conditions and intellectual trends of early modern times. The author's grasp of the vast, often obscure, but highly interesting body of literature which emerged in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries commands the attention of a wide readership outside purely academic boundaries. He weaves together a series of separate studies, emphasising links between the figures, the philosophies and the literatures of early modern times; links which have previously only been suspected. In focussing on the ars apodemica, or art of travelling'', a body of formal instructions on how to travel, observe and record the information gathered, the author demonstrates the origins of the characteristic inquisitive and systematizing spirit of the modern West.