In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a European with money, learning and a certain cast of mind would set aside a room, or a single tall cupboard, for the strange. Into it went shells and corals, stuffed crocodiles and dried pufferfish, carved cherry stones, clocks, coins, mandrake roots, ostrich eggs, a lump of amber with a fly inside, and, if the collector was lucky, a unicorn's horn. The horn was the tusk of a narwhal, but nobody in the room knew that, and its value was enormous.
These were cabinets of curiosities, sometimes called by their German name, the Wunderkammer or chamber of wonders. Many of the great museums began as one. This essay is about them, and about the collecting habit they fed, written by someone who looks after a collection and has had time to wonder what the habit is.
The world in a room
A cabinet was not a random heap, though it could look like one. Its owners usually sorted their holdings into the products of nature, the products of human skill, scientific instruments and things from far away. The aim was to assemble a small model of the whole world, a microcosm, in which the collector could stand and survey creation.
Behind this lay the old esoteric doctrine of correspondence described in Hermeticism: An Orientation. If the cosmos is woven together by hidden sympathies, then a coral that looks like a tree and a stone that looks like an eye are clues to its structure. The cabinet placed them side by side so that the connections could be felt. It was an argument conducted with objects.
Its governing emotion was wonder. A modern museum tries to explain. A cabinet tried to astonish. The two aims eventually parted, and the museum won, and wonder was demoted to a feeling for children and tourists. Something was lost in the transaction, and the cabinet revivals of recent decades, with their glass domes and skeletons in parlors, are partly an attempt to get it back.
Why people collect
The collector is a familiar type, and the explanations offered for the type are many. Each catches part of it.
- The hunt
- Much of the pleasure lies in the search: the rumor of a piece, the dealer's back room, the find in a box of junk. A collection is the trophy wall of a chase.
- The series
- Objects in a set gain meaning from one another. The single stamp is a scrap; the complete issue is a statement. The collector is driven by gaps, and every acquisition reveals a new one.
- Control
- The world is disordered and the shelf is not. A collection is a small region of reality in which everything is labeled, accounted for and in its place.
- Survival
- Objects outlast people. A collection is a self made of things, and it can feel like a way of persisting after the collector has gone.
All four have a shadow. The hunt can become compulsion; the series can become an obsession with the gap rather than the thing; control can tip into hoarding, the condition in which the collection collects the collector. And the collection rarely survives. The auction house is where most collections go to be taken apart, lot by lot, and the sale catalog is the collector's obituary.
The strange in particular
Why the strange? Why not porcelain? Part of the answer is wonder again: the anomaly, the freak of nature, the object that should not exist, is the purest stimulus to it. Part of it is mortality. The skull on the shelf, the bird under the dome and the bottled specimen are descendants of the memento mori, the reminder of death that a scholar kept on his desk to sober him. A collection of the strange is often a collection of the dead, arranged.
And part of it is the fake. The cabinets were full of fabrications: the dragon assembled from a ray, the mermaid made by sewing the top half of a monkey to the tail of a fish, which an American showman exhibited to paying crowds in the 1840s. The fake is not a failure of the cabinet but one of its central exhibits. It tests the viewer. The pleasure of the strange includes the pleasure of not being sure.
The fake is not a failure of the cabinet but one of its central exhibits.
Where the habit turns dark
The history of collecting the strange is not all mermaids, and an honest account has to say so. Cabinets and their successors held human remains taken without consent, many of them acquired through conquest. Living people were exhibited as curiosities at fairs and in shows, well into the twentieth century, and the people who paid to look at them included scientists. Museums are still working out what to return and to whom.
A modern version of the same problem is the trade in what its dealers call murderabilia: objects associated with notorious killings and the people who committed them. The appeal is the appeal of the cabinet, a charged object with a terrible story, but the story belongs to victims who are recent, named and grieved. The archive does not collect such things, and does not describe them. A limit is easy to state: the strange is a fair subject for collection when the only person it can embarrass is the collector.
The archive as a cabinet
This archive is a cabinet of a kind, and its curiosities room says so. The strange dispatches are introduced as preserved specimens, labeled with care and not to be mistaken for the living animal. The grotesque gallery hangs its plates as a cabinet would, for wonder before explanation.
What a librarian adds to the collector's instinct is the label. The great sin of the old cabinets was not that they contained fakes but that they did not say which ones were fake. A collection of the strange is only as good as its account of what it holds: where each thing came from, what it is, and how far it can be trusted. That is the whole of our method, and it is why so much of this site is footnote.
The collecting habit is, at bottom, an argument with decay. Each object on the shelf is one that was not thrown away. That argument will be lost, as all of them are; the cabinet will be dispersed, the jars will crack, the labels will fade. In the meantime the strange things sit in their rows, looked after, and anyone who comes in may look at them and be astonished, and then read the label, and be astonished again.