The Museum Book: A Guide to Strange and Wonderful Collections - Tapa blanda

A book of real substance. * Culture (Supplement of The Sunday Times) * There could not be a more marvellous memorial of Jan Mark, who died last year, than The Museum Book, illustrated with bright elegance by Richard Holland. This is an argument she must have wanted to make. There is nothing dustily didactic about it. It is a passionate, unpatronising, offbeat paean to museums and multiplicity. * The Observer *

Suppose you went into a museum and you didn’t know what it was. From the first sentence of this brilliant book, Jan Mark inspires us to think. She muses on the Muses and the word museum, on why and how people collect things, on different kinds of museums (cabinets, buildings, villages, towns), on their contribution to science and on the notion of classification. She examines the Elgin Marbles (saved or stolen?), famous fakes, the dodo, and some great collectors.