Signs of their creators’ status, wealth, and intellect, Wunderkammers (Cabinets of Curiosities) were special rooms or cabinets containing conglomerations of items, including paintings and drawings; plant specimens; animals (including monstrosities); shells and coral; fossils; coins and medals; ancient sculpture and tools (hopefully antique); gold and silver art objects, automata, and items of ethnographical interest from the New World, Africa, and East Asia—you name it! The proud owners of Wunderkammers sometimes published elaborate illustrated catalogues to document their collections. Rooms of Wonder showcases dozens of the rarest and most important of these books, drawn from the private library of curator Florence Fearrington, as well as from collections at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Getty Research Institute Library, and the Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University. Also represented are tourists’ accounts of Wunderkammers, broadsides advertising traveling exhibitions, auction sale catalogues, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century advertisements for and tickets of admission to commercial ventures put together by such showmen as P. T. Barnum. Published in support of the 2012–13 Grolier Club exhibition, this catalogue takes readers on a tour of these remarkable rooms.
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Book
Fairman, Elisabeth R.;
Art, Yale Center for British;
(2014)
Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists' Books and the Natural World
(/isis/citation/CBB001500458/)
Book
Arlene Leis;
Kacie L. Wills;
(2020)
Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB793486450/)
Book
Annarita Franza;
Johannes Mattes;
Giovanni Pratesi;
(2022)
Collectio Mineralium: The catalog of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II’s mineralogical collection
(/isis/citation/CBB014571670/)
Article
Beer, Liang de;
(2014)
Voor iedere vriend van de wetenschap. Het publiek van het naturaliënkabinet van de Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen in de jaren 1772--1830
(/isis/citation/CBB001321075/)
Article
Knoeff, Rina;
(2015)
Touching Anatomy: On the Handling of Preparations in the Anatomical Cabinets of Frederik Ruysch (1638--1731)
(/isis/citation/CBB001422112/)
Book
Ethan W. Lasser;
(2017)
The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard's Teaching Cabinet, 1766–1820
(/isis/citation/CBB395923035/)
Chapter
Ashley J. Inglehart;
(2018)
Filippo Buonanni and the Kircher Museum
(/isis/citation/CBB074439858/)
Book
Eva Dolezel;
(2018)
Ordnen - Vernetzen - Vermitteln: Kunst- und Naturalienkammern der Frühen Neuzeit als Lehr- und Lernorte
(/isis/citation/CBB916430479/)
Chapter
McAleer, John;
(2012)
The Case of Thomas Baines, Curator-Explorer Extraordinaire, and the Display of Africa in Nineteenth-Century Norfolk
(/isis/citation/CBB001201465/)
Article
Ottaviani, Alessandro;
(2015)
The Coral of Death
(/isis/citation/CBB001551919/)
Book
Achim, Miruna;
Podgorny, Irina;
(2013)
Museos al detalle: colecciones, antigüedades e historia natural, 1790--1870
(/isis/citation/CBB001500461/)
Article
Thomas, Jennifer M.;
(2012)
The Documentation of the British Museum's Natural History Collections, 1760--1836
(/isis/citation/CBB001220858/)
Article
Elena Canadelli;
(2016)
Marble Busts and Fish Fossils: The Catalog of the Museum of naturalia and artificialia at the University of Padua (1797)
(/isis/citation/CBB561990879/)
Book
Wolf, Edward D.;
(2016)
Wolf Telescopes: A Collection of Historical Telescopes
(/isis/citation/CBB256339211/)
Book
Sean Silver;
(2015)
The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought
(/isis/citation/CBB683914404/)
Article
Thomas, Jennifer;
(2011)
Compiling “God's great book [of] universal nature”: The Royal Society's Collecting Strategies
(/isis/citation/CBB001200258/)
Article
Kinukawa, Tomomi;
(2013)
Learned vs. Commercial? The Commodification of Nature in Early Modern Natural History Specimen Exchanges in England, Germany, and the Netherlands
(/isis/citation/CBB001320518/)
Chapter
Achim, Miruna;
Podgorny, Irian;
(2013)
Descripción densa, historia de la ciencia y las prácticas del coleccionismo en los años de la revolución, la guerra y la independencia
(/isis/citation/CBB001500462/)
Book
Longair, Sarah;
McAleer, John;
(2012)
Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience
(/isis/citation/CBB001201464/)
Book
Diana Polhill;
Roger Polhill;
(2015)
East African Plant Collectors
(/isis/citation/CBB107085278/)
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