shewhomust | Jan. 16th, 2014

I have great admiration for those single-minded folks who set up a blog to document one thing and one thing only: photographs of London's shop fronts, or descriptions of cooking their way through Julia Child, say. There are recurring obsessions in this blog, but if there is an actual theme, I have yet to discover it. I'm less enthusiastic about the collection of concrete objects (other than books, obviously), but the same applies: I don't collect, I accumulate, and the objects accumulated are things which appeal to me individually, rather than representatives of some general class of things. Naturally I try to justify myself by the precedent of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Now, according to this recent Guardian article, the Cabinet of Curiosities is back in fashion. Of course, this means that it is no longer sufficient to gather interesting and beautiful specimens, and arrange them to your own satisfaction, whether you are an affluent gentleman with a dedicated display room in your mansion or a lead-miner constructing spar boxes from minerals smuggled away from the mine. Now we have a project at the Prado in which an artist rearranges exhibits to reflect the museum's origins as, in effect, a cabinet of curiosities, bringing together works of art and speciments from natural history (I am charmed to discover there is a painting called 'His Majesty's Anteater'). What's more, my taste is not really macabre enough to meet the criteria laid down in the article.

I comfort myself that this may be so, but that the article uses the words "carved sperm whale teeth" to describe something which is illustrated (in the paper edition only) by a piece of scrimshaw: don't they know the word? Thinking about this set me wandering about the internet, whence I return with treasure: starting with a word that I didn't know, scrimshander, a maker of scrimshaw. It's a beautiful word, and reflects a view of scrimshaw I had not previously come across, in which it is not a folk art, made by sailors with a little time and a the simplest of tools and materials, but an art exercised by specialists. This mermaid is carved on a whale tooth, but she is not scrimshaw as I have hitherto known it. This whaling scene is more representative, scratched or incised rather than "carved", and here is the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, awaiting transfer to their new scrimshaw gallery.

One last curiosity for my cabinet: thanks to