I was especially interested this year because a friend of mine said that the gift shop had been “gothed up,” and that sort of thing gets my attention. Not that you have any choice if you park in the garage, but that description made the gift shop my first stop.
It turns out it’s the same old gift shop with one notable new exception: a tie-in side store for the "Cabinet of Curiosities" exhibit on the second floor. Honestly, it’s better than the actual exhibit.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve never seen a stuffed crocodile glued upside-down to the ceiling before. Ditto a severed giraffe’s neck and head in skeleton form. I’m happy as a clam to cross those off my list. For all intents and purposes, though, the Cabinet of Curiosities exhibit is more properly titled Dead Animals and Parts of Dead Animals (And Maybe an Old-School Diving Helmet). It’s neat, but I’ve seen more curious curiosities in Bret and Rachel Harmeyer’s living room. It’s just not worth the price of admission.
The gift shop tie-in, though? I actually spent a half an hour enthralled. Look at some of this stuff!
Every curiosity shop should have at least one thing that looks like Clive Barker keeps it on his desk.
Photo by Jef Rouner
There really are not enough affordable skull-and-raven paperweights in the world. At least if you're me.
Photo by Jef Rouner
Victorian ladies had an obsession with caged birds...you can work that symbolism out for yourself.
Photo by Jef Rouner
Granted, it’s no Wilde Collection, but it still far better manages to capture the Victorian curiosity mind-set. There’s a prominent preoccupation with death and mortality expressed through the many skull motifs. There’s also a much more scientific bent than with the exhibit. They have turtles in jars, beakers and stuff like that. There is a real feeling that the objects scattered around for sale have meaning because they are unusual. They embody, well, curiosity.
The exhibit tries, I’ll grant you. It’s got to be one of the only exhibits I’ve ever been in where I was encouraged to open drawers and look inside; having been a museum-goer since I was a child, the feeling of touching anything in a museum was strangely decadent. Pity what was inside was mostly shells and snakeskins. I find weirder things than that walking my daughter to school.
The shop also embodies the concept of the curiosity shop in another way: It’s shamelessly capitalistic. I think that matters. The Victorians very much had the idea that everything had a price, even death and the lives of exotic animals and people. A true cabinet of curiosities would assign a dollar value to everything, from the corpse of an extinct creature to the sacred jewelry of a faraway tribe.
It’s still very mainstream, mind you. And expensive. I really wanted the fairy encased in amber, but it’s not coming home with me on a writer’s paycheck. For a true experience in this regard, Wilde Collection is still your best bet, but if you’re visiting the museum anyway, pop into this odd little corner. It’s indeed gothic AF and full of odd wonders.
