Cabinet of Curiosities: History, Trivia, and ?

 

 

 

 

Cabinet of Curiosities: A Collection of History’s Most Incredible Stories (2024)

By Aaron Mahnke (with Harry Marks)

St. Martin’s Press, 336 pages,

(Available November 12, 2024)

★★★

 

Perhaps you think museums specialize in dominant collections: art, archaeology, aerospace, costumes, furniture, historical homes, science, transportation…. Actually, a singular focus is relatively recent in Western culture. Those with long memories might recall that the Peabody Essex Museum’s India Hall (Salem, MA) used to be filled with tall cases filled with items choked in willy nilly. These once-ubiquitous displays were cabinets of curiosities, unusual objects (for their day) collected by travelers that inspired the abbreviation curio. If objects, why not ideas, “virtual” objects to stuff into mental cabinets.

 

Aaron Mahnke is a successful podcaster and writer whose about-to-be-released book, Cabinet of Curiosities, is an agglomeration of historical events, coincidences, gutsy feats, inventions, tales, and unorthodox people loosely stitched together as “historical.” If you’re scholarly-language averse, don’t worry; Mahnke’s book is about as far from hardcore academia as you can get. Many of his stories rest upon (sometimes obvious) teasers or end in puns. How one reacts to these is strictly a matter of taste.

 

Mahnke blurs the line between events of historical significance and trivia. A few of his short entries–most are just a few pages–are either disputed or apocryphal. Examples of these include the cause of Rudolph Valentino’s death, a 124-year-old Civil War veteran, the Crawfordville (IN) monster, ghost stories, and the assumed fate of a member of the Franklin Expedition. (That one got a new twist this month!) Others certainly fall into the trivia category often labelled “fun facts.” These include the fate of L. Frank Baum’s jacket, why composers fear writing a 13^th symphony, a woman who braved Niagara Falls in a barrel, people with prodigious memories, and jokes that became realities. Some are not-so-much-fun facts. Do we really care that the overweight Goran Krupp failed to climb Mt. Everest in 1966, or that Gene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek, had a troubled history with flying?

 

Full Disclosure: I am a professional historian, so the next critique should be filtered through that lens but tempered by the fact that I’m not a snob. (I celebrate anything that sparks an interest in history.) Numerous Mahnke “revelations” are pretty well known. These include the astronomical coincidence of Mark Twain’s birth and death, how Theodore Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt, the story of the Learned Pig, the last Japanese World War II soldier, Henry Brown’s unique escape from enslavement, the link between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and galvanism, how seances are faked, the background of da Vinci’s flying machine, and Louis B. Mayer’s sly-but-failed plan to rid Hollywood of labor unions.

 

To give credit where it’s due, Cabinet of Curiosities is exactly as it purports to be. It is as if random occurences from human history got stuffed into an attic full of unmarked boxes. Anyone who has ever gone to a flea market knows the frisson of picking through a container of the humdrum and happening upon something marvelous. Mahnke  divides his book into a dozen easily digestible sections. I would recommend that you do not try to read it in big gulps. The problem with physical cabinets of curiosities was that so many objects in one place tended to overwhelm viewers; wonderment began to meld into mental mush. The same can be true of this book, so read a few tales, think about them, and put the book aside. If something seems a bit “fishy,” it’s never been easier to check for other interpretations. Rinse and repeat.  

 

I’m not sure if Mahnke had this audience in mind, but teachers can mine gold from this book. I often used folklore in my own classes to enliven weary students. Were all of those stories true? If they weren't, they should have been!

 

Rob Weir  

 

Thanks to Macmillan and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book.