The Museum of Whales You Will Never See The Museum of Whales You Will Never See

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See

And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums

    • 5.0 • 2 Ratings
    • $4.99
    • $4.99

Publisher Description

“Filled with charming illustrations, this delightful book about Iceland’s 265 museums is as quirky and mesmerizing as the country’s dreamscape itself.” Forbes

Mythic creatures, natural wonders, and the mysterious human impulse to collect are on beguiling display in this poetic tribute to the museums of an otherworldly island nation, for readers of Atlas Obscura and fans of the Mütter Museum, the Morbid Anatomy Museum, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology.


Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can't be seen?

In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects--a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams--can map a people's past and future, their fears and obsessions. "The world is chockablock with untold wonders," she writes, "there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open."

GENRE
Travel & Adventure
RELEASED
2020
May 12
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
272
Pages
PUBLISHER
Penguin Publishing Group
SELLER
PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.
SIZE
20.1
MB

Customer Reviews

Brxs ,

Extraordinary!

Unlike anything ever written about Iceland, or any museum. Poetic poignant passionate — a book of love and grace and whimsical curiosities that enlighten and release encapsulated joy. And tears of beauty.

[Full disclosure: I am briefly referenced in the book.]

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