Books: The Secret Museum

I have two persistent complaints about many of the books I am asked to review for these pages – the frequent relapse into impenetrable language and the use of grainy black-and-white photographs at a time when even our daily newspapers are able to use full colour.

It’s the festive season and, feeling I might catch Museums Journal’s editor in a generous mood, I plucked up courage to ask for a book with colour pictures and a readable style, perhaps something for curators looking to add to their Christmas lists. I was generously given The Secret Museum by Molly Oldfield.

The title is misleading – the objects in this museum are not secret nor do they form a single museum. What Oldfield has created is an imaginary Cabinet of Curiosities, its contents scattered across the globe.

The first giraffe in France

Its imaginary shelves, like much of Oldfield’s writing, are laden with facts, figures and a genuine enthusiasm, not only for the objects she has selected but also for those who care for them.

It’s the book’s subtitle that gives it all away – “some treasures are too precious to display” – and The Secret Museum focuses on the author’s selection of 60 objects held in museum collections around the world but which, for one reason or another (light, temperature, security, value, size), are not kept on public display.

When it comes to gathering information, Oldfield appears something of a frenetic magpie. Seemingly inexhaustible, she scurries from Europe to the US, Mexico to Stockholm, Rio to Venice, Scotland to Amsterdam. She darts down alleys, bustles up stairs, pokes her head into boxes and drawers and finds a host of objects that interest her.

These include Wally Herbert’s sledge; the first giraffe in France; Charles Dickens’s letter opener; a piece of Newton’s apple tree; and hats owned by Livingstone and Stanley.

There are objects from Tibet, Japan and Hawaii, and Dame Margot Fonteyn’s tutu.
Bubbling with enthusiasm, she never allows herself to be restricted to the principal objects she has included in her collection.

Bouncing from one object to another like a frenzied ball in a pinball machine, she often scoops together a second, sometimes even a third tier, of objects.

Take, for example, her visit to the National Maritime Museum in London, which begins with her request to see the huge Spanish flag, captured by the British Fleet at Trafalgar. “It’s a whopper,” says the museum’s curator of antiquities.

Four pages later, via Bounce the dog, Nelson’s death, his relationship with the Brontës, a message balloon used in the search for John Franklin, the Arctic explorer, you suddenly find yourself reading about the world’s smallest cannon, once owned by Queen Victoria – “so she could look at it whenever she liked”, says Oldfield, rather tweely, appearing to forget you need a microscope to see it.

Hold on! How did I get here? It’s like trying to track the route map of a pub conversation.
 
Rich stories

The result is a curious, somewhat exhausting, book. It is more for dipping into than reading in one sitting – but it can be fun too.

Once you became accustomed to Oldfield’s rather breathless style and take The Secret Museum at your speed rather than hers, you find yourself caught up in her diverse and very personal collection.

The book is rich with stories built around the 60 objects and many more. At times it reads little like The Girls’ (or Boys’) Own Book of Museums – and you might even expect a quiz at the end.

The charm of The Secret Museum is the author’s enthusiasm for museums “as great places to go to learn, to get fresh ideas and to wander around in beauty”.

No photo opportunity

It would have been easy for Oldfield to go down that dusty and well-trodden path and be critical of the fact that a large percentage of museum collections are not on public view. She’s tempted.

On the opening page of her introduction she talks of “behind closed doors… hidden away”, but soon she sets out the reasons for this imbalance and explains her compulsion “to take some of these treasures and lift them into the light and onto the pages of this book”.

Ah! I hear you say – that’s where the photos come in – those big colour photographs we were waiting to see. I am afraid not – for some reason the publishers have decided to place an emphasis on illustrations by Hennie Haworth.

The photos, such as they are, are all tiny. It’s a missed opportunity.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant