Cowgirls, Cockroaches and Celebrity Lingerie: The World's Most Unusual Museums
UK £9.99,Canada $20.00,
UK Publication November 2007
ISBN 9781840468335
Hardback
Buy: | Amazon UK| Amazon US| Waterstones| Book Depository
'There isn't a cockroach I don't like, not even a dead one.' Michael Bohdan, Cockroach Hall of Fame
'I wasn't interested in collecting stamps.' Sigurdur Hjartarson, curator of the Icelandic Phallological Museum
'Artists who make it into the MOBA portraiture collection are oft visited by a unique, possibly extraterrestrial muse. Maybe one with rabies.' Museum of Bad Art website
Michelle Lovric presents an armchair pilgrimage to some of the world's oddest and most interesting museums. The include collections of asparagus, lawnmowers, ships in bottles, the pets of American presidents, menstruation, worry beads and burnt food. There's the vast SPAM Museum in Minnesota, the tiny Carrot Museum in Belgium, Iceland's elegant and studious Phallological Museum, the high-tech Parasitological Museum in Japan, the chilling Museum of Madness in Venice, or London's atmospheric Old Operating Theatre.
Each entry describes in colourful detail an unusual or remarkable museum. Curators explain the reasons behind their collections, while other museums let their exhibits speak for themselves - conclusive proof that one man's rubbish is another man's relic.
Troubled by how conformist, boring and homogeneous the world seems sometimes? Cowgirls, Cockroaches and Celebrity Lingerie is the ideal tonic - a quirky and uplifting celebration of the infinite variety of the objects of human desire.
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Michelle Lovric writes, researches, translates and designs anthologies and gift books. Her Love Letters: an Anthology of Passion was a New York Times bestseller. She has published three historical novels, one of which, The Remedy, was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
See more books by: Michelle Lovric
