The Secret Lives of Everyday Artifacts: From a Pope's Ring to a Prisoner's Compass: The Astonishing True Stories Behind the Objects History Left Behin (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798177225890)

Discover the true stories hiding behind nineteen objects sitting in museum cases, kitchen drawers, and jewelry boxes around the world.

• A key to a door that hasn't existed since 1789, still hanging in George Washington's front hall.
• A ring destroyed within hours of a pope's death, every single time, for five hundred years.
• A wristwatch invented so a pilot wouldn't have to let go of his controls.
• A necklace nobody bought that helped bring down a monarchy.

In The Secret Lives of Everyday Artifacts, Mike Seabourne turns his attention from the objects on your kitchen counter to the ones behind glass: the compass that helped a prisoner of war escape occupied Europe, the sword an officer kept oiled for twenty-nine years after the war it belonged to had already ended, the bottle that drifted the ocean for 131 years before washing up on an Australian beach. Each chapter follows one object from the moment it stopped doing its original job to the moment someone decided it was worth keeping anyway.

Written in the same warm, sharply researched style as The Secret Lives of Everyday Things and The Secret Lives of Everyday Utensils, this fourth installment proves that the objects we display often have stranger, better-documented histories than the ones we use every day. Every story here is checked against primary sources, museum records, and declassified documents, not repeated because it makes a better anecdote.

If you've ever stood in front of a museum case and wondered what the small card wasn't telling you, this book is for you.


Author: Mike Seabourne
ISBN-13: 9798177225890
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 09/27/2026
Pages: 168
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.51lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.36d