By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:02 am Wednesday, Dec 21
At
Cool Tools, Kevin Kelly writes an enthusiast review of
Secret Museum of Mankind, a book that I also love.
What a mysterious and fantastical book. This hefty softcover is a facsimile collection of thousands of exotic and sensational photographs dating from around the turn of the century when news of any sort from far away lands was rare. It's sort of a combination of early uncensored National Geographic and Ripley's Believe It or Not. Reproduced without a known author, or copyright, or even authentication of the captions, it was for many years a "secret" underground publication. And for pure gawking pleasures it still can't be beat. Cannibals, executioners, and fakirs, oh my! Toolwise, it serves as a mighty sourcebook of amazing costumes, body modifications and hairdos, architectural novelties, and extinct strange rituals. (I'm convinced science fiction film directors mine this for alien worlds.) I like to think of this book as the best one volume catalog of cultural diversity on Earth. For the most part these societies are long gone, and remain only in rare books like this one. It's a super bargain at $25.
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