The museum as we know it began with the 16th-century cabinet of marvels, or wunderkammer. Such “cabinets” were the joy of eccentric, rapaciously curious collectors of specimens both natural (naturalia) and manmade (artefacta). Often, the items housed in the wunderkammer “belonged together only because they had been collected,” as Jonathan Buckley writes of the holdings of his fictitious Sanderson-Perceval Museum in The Great Concert of the Night. “Not every museum possesses items that are marvellous, but all objects in a museum emit some sort of charge; they have a resonant presence ... They are untouchable.”
Buckley’s narrator, David, is an employee of this tiny, financially troubled museum, a curator and guardian of its modest treasure hoard: artefacta such as glass jellyfish and musical instruments, naturalia such as a stillborn baby whose exposed muscles and blood vessels “gleam like varnished wax.”
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