In my own backyard sits the Platen Press Museum. Paul Aken of Zion, Illinois has an amazing collection of letterpress, type, multigraphing, stone lithography, bookbinding and everything cast iron from the 1800’s through the mid 1900’s. You know, when things used to be printed? Remember that? Probably not…you’re too busy...
My apologies for the recent turn of events, in which I have posted random thoughts on architectural analysis of musems and random photos of people painting in the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the last month this blog has lost its original purpose of telling you about one-of-a-kind attractions. So...
Thanks to writer and artist and former taxi driver Dmitry Samarov for letting me know about the “Virtual Museum of Taxi Meters”. I’ve written about digital museums before, from the Vibrator Museum in Michigan to the Big Internet Museum, not available in the real world of course because it’s about...
Our ancestors were lucky if they had a single photograph of their wedding day, if they had any at all. That’s nothing compared to the brides and grooms of today who have thousands of pics (and changed facebook statuses) to prove to the world they are married, are important and...
The Lorraine Motel in Memphis is the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Now part of a 4 acre complex of buildings that make up the National Civil Rights Museum, the motel is connected by underground tunnel to the Young and Morrow Buildings, where James Earl Ray initially confessed (and...
The Museum of Wildlife, Industry and Science in Webster, South Dakota has a shoe collection housed in a special building. What makes it so special? Well, as you can see from the above photo it resembles a shoe that no one in the real world or with the right mind...
We interrupt our regularly scheduled guest posts, so I can write a submission of my own for American Guide Week. One of the questions in the original 1935 manual for the American Guide series of books asks for interesting landmarks in your district. Considering I live in Chicagoland and this...
As someone fascinated with people who obsessively collect, the Belhaven Memorial Museum sounds like it’s right up my hoarder alley. Located in a historic town hall, this giant antique store…ahem, I mean museum…displays over 40,000 objects that once belonged to one woman, Miss Eva Blount Way. (what a pleasant-looking lady,...
The 1963 Campaign led by civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama (which at the time was one of the most racially divided cities in the U.S.) culminated in a number of widely publicized confrontations between young black students and white civic authorities, mostly through water hoses and police dogs, that...
Here’s a random Saturday post for y'all with King Ludwig’s Gallery of Beauties (or Schönheitengalerie for those from Deutschland). In the south pavilion of Nymphenburg Palace is a collection of 36 portraits of the most beautiful women from the nobility and middle classes of Munich painted between 1827 and 1850....
