Stack Overflow: Curious Collections
A lot of people like to collect things, sometimes useful and sometimes not. Our house is filled with books and board games (probably not a surprise), but we also have a windowsill covered with rocks of different sizes, and a whole lot of mugs from different places, and way too many charging cables. My kids have collected things like the little plastic stands inside pizza boxes, little animal eraser puzzles, acorns, and late slips from school.
It’s hard to say what sparks this urge to amass items that fit a particular category — is it an attempt to impose some bit of order on a chaotic world? Is it an overly optimistic view of how much time I will spend reading? (Okay, in the case of books … probably yes.) Whatever it is, once you have several things that fit with each other, it’s easy for it to snowball, and it’s interesting to me seeing what other people collect and what it means to them.
Before we get to the books, I wanted to share one other unbelievable story that I heard last fall. At the last XOXO Festival, Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic, gave a talk about finding a peculiar mural at a Mcdonald’s, and then falling down a rabbit hole exploring the artwork of Wes Cook, the painter of the mural. He ended up buying up a lot of Cook’s artwork and sketches, which he has made available to see online. But before you dig too deep into this collection, watch the video because it is just bonkers.
Okay, without further ado: today’s stack is a collection of collections: souvenirs, words, ideas, monsters, and more!
LEGO Botanical Almanac from Chronicle Books, illustrated by Nina Pace
LEGO, of course, is an entire family of collecting — you could collect minifigs, Star Wars sets, specific types of bricks, and more. This small book focuses on the botanical sets, which are designed to look like actual flowers and plants. We’ve assembled a couple of these and I love the way they make you look at the LEGO pieces in a different way, making organic, sometimes irregular forms from something that we usually think of as uniform and standardized.
This book is a little bit like a field guide: it gives details about each plant and flower featured in a LEGO botanical set, accompanied by illustrations by Nina Pace that are realistic enough that you might think they’re photos at a glance. There are also some photographs of the completed pieces. The book includes several interviews with the designers of the sets, giving some insight about the process of creating the botanicals, and there is even a small print included at the back.
Souvenir Nation by William L. Bird, Jr.
I’ve actually had this book on my shelf for over a decade (see above re: collecting books) but I finally got around to reading it. As the subtitle states, it’s a collection of “Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History,” selected by a historian and curator of said museum. Each entry has a photograph of the item and a one-page description of its historical significance and how it came to be in the museum, from a piece of Plymouth Rock to the pen used to sign the WWI armistice agreement to a magnifying glass used to examine hanging chads in the 2000 presidential election. Although they are from the American history museum, there are a few artifacts from abroad, too, like a piece of the Bastille and a collection of railway ticket punches from around the world.
Aside from the collection itself, though, I found the introduction really fascinating as an examination of the culture of collecting. At 45 pages, the introduction is nearly a third of the book. Bird explains the way that travelers took it upon themselves to make their own souvenirs: for instance, visitors to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, would simply take away pieces of the estate. People cut swatches from curtains in the White House, picked up mosaic tiles from Tiberius’ palace, and chipped off so many chunks of the “final” railroad tie of the Pacific Railroad that it had actually been replaced multiple times. Eventually proprietors of some locations developed the practice of creating souvenirs that people could buy, but that didn’t always stop tourists from taking things into their own hands, literally.
The introduction also gives a lot of background on the creation of the Smithsonian itself, including the way that different directors interpreted James Smithson’s mandate. There are stories of how various collections were acquired, and the various ways that directors and curators attempted to categorize them. If you like stories about the weird bits of American history, this is a fun read — though it appears to be out of print, so you may need to do a bit of collecting yourself to get a copy!
The Curious Compendium of Wonderful Words by Erin McCarthy and Mental Floss
This one’s for the logophiles: “A Miscellany of Obscure Terms, Bizarre Phrases, and Surprising Etymologies.” What’s the one letter in the English alphabet that is never silent? Why do we hate the word “moist”? Need to know the collective noun for a group of rattlesnakes? The Curious Compendium will answer all these questions and many, many more. It’s the perfect book to just pick up and flip through when you’ve got a few minutes, and you’ll come away with a fun factoid about language like some old-fashioned insults or the reason golfers shout “Fore!”
The Madman’s Gallery by Edward Brooke-Hitching
If you like weird artwork, you’ll love this trip through art history. Brooke-Hitching, who also has a book called The Madman’s Library about literary curiosities, takes the reader on a journey to explore all the strangest nooks and crannies of paintings and sculptures. There are things you may expect, like Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights or the vegetable portraits by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, but there are also plenty of more obscure pieces (at least to me), like Zarh Pritchard’s underwater paintings or the strangely compelling Character Heads by Franz Zaver Messerschmidt. There are flying monks and headless saints, nude Mona Lisas and a statue of a weird snake deity hand puppet.
Each piece in the book is accompanied by a short essay describing its significance, often linking it to other similar pieces that are also pictured in subsequent pages. Toward the end of the book, we also get sections about surrealism, “Outsider art” — created by people outside of the mainstream art world, performance art, and finally a short piece about AI-generated imagery. While the text can be a bit academic, I really enjoyed learning about a lot of strange pieces that I hadn’t heard of before, and to me it really shows how incredibly innovative and creative — and bizarre — people are and have always been.
Yokai: The Art of Shigeru Mizuki translated by Zack Davisson
Shigeru Mizuki was a manga artist who had a huge impact on Japanese comics, particularly with his style of cartoony characters against very realistic, detailed backgrounds. One of his major contributions was comics about yokai — Japanese monsters and creatures, many of which Mizuki invented himself for his stories. This big hardcover book is a collection of about 80 of Mizuki’s creatures. Each two-page spread has a large color illustration of the yokai on one page, with its name and a paragraph-long description on the facing page. The illustrations are remarkably detailed: many of the backgrounds look like they could be photocopies of photographs rather than drawings, and the yokai themselves range from cartoony to creepy. While I didn’t know a lot of the yokai depicted in the book, I was entranced by this parade of creatures.
Jim Henson’s Imagination Illustrated by Karen Falk
Just about 60 years ago, Jim Henson began documenting his life in a small red journal — first he went back and recorded prior years by referring to calendars and appointment books, and then he continued jotting down significant events going forward. This book reproduces bits of that journal — usually just a single line for a day — but then accompanies it with a plethora of supporting material like photographs, design sketches, scripts, advertisements, and more. As his daughter Lisa Henson says in the foreword, Jim Henson produced “only a fraction of all the ideas that he had, and what we generally see today is only a fraction of what he produced.”
Even if you were already amazed by what Jim Henson created, this book will astound you with how much more there was. The book traces the origins of the Muppets and their various appearances in commercials and TV shows and movies. For instance, I didn’t know that Henson’s proposed title for The Muppet Show was actually Sex and Violence with the Muppets. One theme that shows up throughout the book is the fact that Henson wanted to remind people that he wanted to reach adults as well as kids: he had live shows in Vegas, designed a spherical nightclub that was never built, and performed on late-night television (including a new TV show called Saturday Night Live).
It’s fun to see the little notes that Henson made in his journal in his own handwriting. In 1977 when he and Brian Froud started to collaborate for The Dark Crystal, the note says “August we make deal with BRIAN FROUD to do great film.” Great indeed! The sheer amount of imagination on display in this book is incredible, and kudos to Karen Falk for gathering it all together in one place for us to appreciate.
Things to Look Forward To by Sophie Blackall
Like the rest of the world, Sophie Blackall had been reeling from the events of 2020, and she made a list of Things to Look Forward To and posted it on Instagram with her hand-drawn illustrations. It got a strong reaction — a lot of people were in need of something hopeful, even if it was something small like drawing faces on your eggs. This book, originally published in 2022, collects up Blackall’s list of “52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day.” Each entry is accompanied by her drawings, sometimes with an additional two-page spread for the larger illustrations, and then a description that may be as short as a couple sentences or as long as a page or two. The things run the gamut: there are things that feel universal, like coffee and tea, rain, coming home. And there are things that feel very specific: not opening a present, doing taxes. (Which reminds me, I need to do mine today!) But the overall message that Blackall has isn’t about appreciating her specific list of things, but to think about what’s on your own list.
Right now it feels like there are a lot of things that aren’t going great, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the news or, say, the slew of Kickstarter updates from board game publishers explaining the effects of a 145% tariff on goods from China. Things to Look Forward To isn’t about ignoring the world or pretending everything is okay, but it’s about finding something that helps sustain you and gives you a reason to keep going, and hopefully you’ll have more strength to fight the battles you need to fight.
My Current Stack
I’ve just started a time-travel book called The Edge of Yesterday by Rita Woods — so far it’s about a young doctor from a prominent Black family in 1925 Detroit, but he has some weird link to the present day, too. We’ll see where this one goes!
Disclosure: I received review copies of these books. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers.
