Interview on New England Public Radio

Helen Barrington is a smart and insightful interviewer — so great to talk about Writing with Scissors on her show on New England Public Radio.Interview with Helen Barrington on Writing with Scissors

Cabinets of Curiosity and Scrapbooks

Cabinets of curiosity are collections — 3-D scrapbooks, popular since the 16th century. The scholar Molly Duggins, in from Australia, and I visited the exhibit Rooms of Wonder at the Grolier Club in NYC.

Cabinets of Wonder exhibit at the Grolier Club

The exhibit gathers catalogs of these antecedents of both museums and scrapbooks. Molly’s own work connects cabinets of curiosity and an Australian colonialist scrapbook/album, in her “Arranging the Antipodes: The Archer Family Album as

Mechanical dragon exercise machine

Metaphorical Cabinet”

Molly Duggins’s Australian colonial scrapbook article: “Arranging the Antipodes: The Archer Family Album as Metaphorical Cabinet”

One delightful page from the exhibit shows an ancient exercise machine. Wouldn’t you rather work out on a mechanical dragon?

Link

Short interview about 19th century scrapbooks

Interview on WAMC’s The Roundtable

I’ve gotten fascinating emails from people who heard me interviewed on WAMC’s The Roundtable – a good reminder to post this link.