The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780143135463)

"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 M?ter 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."

Author: A. Kendra Greene
ISBN-10: 0143135465
ISBN-13: 9780143135463
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English
Published: 05/12/2020
Pages: 272
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.30h x 4.90w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/02/2020
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2020
Library Journal 05/01/2020 pg. 133
Booklist 04/15/2020 pg. 4