Curiosities from the Cabinet features 36 museum objects including an ancient Babylonian tablet, a 21st-century webpage, a skeleton marionette and a colony of live ants, found in UK museums from Weston-super-Mare to the Shetland Islands. Over 40 people from inside and outside the museum world - curators, conservators, visitors, users, artists - talk about these objects with knowledge, passion and even tenderness.

Introduction: Opening the cabinet
Inside the cabinet

The touchable

Quilt
St Fagans Museum
Bastet figurine
Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
Anointing spoon replica
Royal Historic Palaces online gift shop

The recreated

Casts of Parthenon Sculptures
Elgin Museum
Colossus rebuild
The National Museum of Computing
Lucifer
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

The ephemeral

Mermaid flyer
Centre for Ephemera Studies
Toilet paper
Land of Lost Content
Twitter feed
The British Library

The lethal

Mercury
Ulster Museum
Flint-lock pistols
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Euthanasia machine
Science Museum

The dead

Barn owl
Booth Museum of Natural History
Crocodile handbag
Cole Museum of Zoology
Jeremy Bentham auto-icon
University College London

The living

Leafcutter ants
Liverpool World Museum
Darwin's weed garden
Down House
Captain Woodget
The Cutty Sark

The extinct

Quagga skeleton
Grant Museum of Zoology
Babylonian map of the world
British Museum
Bend used for peat flittin'
Fetlar Interpretive Centre

The mobile

Skeleton marionette
Victoria and Albert Museum
Wave machine
Whipple Museum of the History of Science
Brantly B2B helicopter
Helicopter Museum

The verbal

Paradise Lost
Milton's Cottage
Wesley monument
Museum of London
Probate copy of the will of Thomas Leyland
International Slavery Museum

The domestic

Britains toy farm set
Museum of English Rural Life
Homemaker plate
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
Jane Austen's writing table
Jane Austen's House Museum

The huge

Coal mine
Big Pit National Coal Museum
Emigrant sailing ship
Ulster American Folk Park
Monasterboice cross
Victoria and Albert Museum

The curious

Hans Sloane's specimen tray
British Museum
Powhatan's mantle
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology
The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
Garden Museum


Closing the cabinet

References and further resources
List of museums