Taxidermy
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Fancy Fowl: How an Evil Sea Captain and a Beloved Queen Made the World Crave KFC
By Ben Marks — During Queen Victoria’s long and productive reign, from 1837 to 1901, countless buildings, books, and pieces of furniture were erected, written, and manufactured. Though the monarch did not invent Queen Anne Revival style, pen , or decree that otherwise comfortable sofas should be crowned with unyielding rims of carved hardwood, causing untold bumps on untold numbers of unsuspecting noggins, we routinely classify this varied output as Victorian Architecture, Victorian Literature, and...
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Sword Swallowers and Shrunken Heads: An Ode to Johnny Fox and His Freakatorium
By Rebecca Rego Barry — Walking home down Clinton Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side one day in 1999, writer and filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro encountered a tall, dark, and handsome man on the sidewalk swallowing fire. "Wow!", Shapiro exclaimed, "Who are you?" It was beloved sword-swallower, magician, and collector Johnny Fox. After Shapiro and Fox chatted for a bit, he invited her into his museum. Shapiro looked at the brightly colored storefront behind him called the Freakatorium: El Museo Loco, and then back...
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Hoarders, Hauntings, and Two-Headed Cows: Dealing Dead People's Things
By Ben Marks — As a child, Duane Scott Cerny didn’t exactly dream of growing up to become one of Chicago’s premier antiques dealers, but his early entrepreneurial instincts should have been a clue that one day he would. His eyes were opened to the world of resale on an unlikely day, November 22, 1963, at the tender age of 4, when the assassination of President Kennedy interrupted Cerny’s lunchtime ritual of watching “Bozo’s Circus” on TV. What, young Cerny wondered, could possibly be more important than...
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How a Colorado Family Built a Home for the World's Weirdest, Most Beautiful Bugs
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Driving along a nondescript section of Highway 115 a few miles south of Colorado Springs, it's hard not to swerve at the sight of a gigantic Hercules beetle, its horns as tall as a house, standing beside a sign for the May Natural History Museum. But this monstrous beetle isn't advertising some two-bit roadside attraction: If you continue another mile down Rock Creek Canyon Road, you’ll find yourself at a small and scholarly museum, housing one of the largest privately owned collections of...
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Learning to Love Death: New Museum Takes a Walk on the Shadow Side
By Lisa Hix — Returning home from a dinner party one night, I wandered down 24th Street in San Francisco’s traditionally Mexican Mission District. I spied a store display lit up with flashing Christmas lights, and looking inside, I saw a life-size plastic skeleton with red lights for eyes. The skeleton was adorned with a fancy biblical robe and was holding a scythe and metal scale. It was flanked by several smaller skeleton figures with similar clothes and gear. "I do not believe it’s morbid to be...
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Mummies and Monkey Skulls: 'Oddities' Host Ryan Matthew Cohn on Creepy Antiques
By Lisa Hix — Halloween is the time of year when people reveal their most ghoulish fears and fantasies, decorating their houses with fake mummies, plastic skulls and skeletons, and eerie contorted faces carved into apples and pumpkins. But for a certain breed of collector, like artist Ryan Matthew Cohn (pictured above, in a photo by Sergio Royzen), this sort of decor is just not creepy enough. Such collectors would rather deck their apartments with specimen jars, real mummified heads, musical instruments...
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Taxidermy Comes Alive! On the Web, the Silver Screen, and in Your Living Room
By Lisa Hix — "Taxidermy is never a mundane science," Rachel Poliquin wrote in her 2009 essay, “Immortal Beauties,” on photographer Mary Frey's ongoing taxidermy ambrotype project "Imagining Fauna." "It is the queasy art of seeing what would not, should not, be seen. It is the art of extending animal form beyond its natural lifespan." Poliquin, a life-long taxidermy connoisseur and scholar from Vancouver, taps into the peculiar yearning this art form evokes in her upcoming Penn State Press book, . For...
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Tales from the Relic Zone: Dad’s Moose Head
By null — I work in "a relic zone." My father bought this building in 1961, and I have worked here permanently since 1963. There are 10,000 stories here, but most are forgotten. One relic story that stands out and will never be forgotten by me, though, concerns the moose head. When look at it, you see a dusty, gnarly moose head. What do I see? Picture a beautiful new trophy on the wall of our family cabin on the San Lorenzo River. To me, it represents my father achieving his goal. In 1953, he went...