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A review by mat_tobin
The Museum Book: A Guide to Strange and Wonderful Collections by Richard Holland, Jan Mark
5.0
An excellent book indeed in which Jan Mark (this was to be her final book) gives us a wonderful tour of the history of the Museum. From its beginnings in the hands of Princess Bel-Shanti to the current day at the Ashmolean, we have here a brief yet deeply fascinating history of the Museum and our constant obsession with cataloging and collecting in an attempt to read and understand the past.
Alongside Holland's mixed-media collages which celebrate the idea of museums also being places in which a mixture of objects are collated and pondered over, Mark's writing makes The Museum Book a little marvel. It isn't just finding out about Peter the Great's obsession with collecting stories of the world through objects or reading about the history of the Wunderkammer that I found engaging but Mark's wonderfully witty and almost informal, rather chatty writing style. She herself sounds like an excited and engaged grandparent taking you around the museum and her last lines on memory and collecting is so clever that it's a wonder that more people aren't talking about this wonderful little gem.
Alongside Holland's mixed-media collages which celebrate the idea of museums also being places in which a mixture of objects are collated and pondered over, Mark's writing makes The Museum Book a little marvel. It isn't just finding out about Peter the Great's obsession with collecting stories of the world through objects or reading about the history of the Wunderkammer that I found engaging but Mark's wonderfully witty and almost informal, rather chatty writing style. She herself sounds like an excited and engaged grandparent taking you around the museum and her last lines on memory and collecting is so clever that it's a wonder that more people aren't talking about this wonderful little gem.