Cowgirls, Cockroaches and Celebrity Lingerie (Hardback)

The World's Most Unusual Museums

Michelle Lovric

This is an eye-popping tour of some of the most eccentric, bizarre and downright absurd collections of artefacts ever put on show. Strange things, human beings. They get passionate about strange things, too. All over the world and throughout the ages people have accumulated the extraordinary objects of their affection. Some of these collections are now museums…Michelle Lovric presents an armchair pilgrimage to some of the world's oddest and most interesting. They include museums of asparagus, lawnmowers, ships in bottles, the pets of American presidents, menstruation, worry beads and burnt food. There's the vast Spam museum in Minnesota, the tiny Carrot Museum in Belgium, Iceland's elegant and studious Phallological Museum, the hi-tech Parasite Museum in Japan, the chilling Museum of Madness in Venice, or London's atmospheric Old Operating Theatre. Each page describes in colourful detail a different eccentric or remarkable museum. Curators explain the reasons behind their collections. Other museums let their exhibits speak for themselves – conclusive proof that one man's rubbish is another man's relic. Troubled by how conformist, boring and homogenous the world sometimes seems? "Cowgirls, Cockroaches and Celebrity Lingerie" is the ideal tonic – a darkly hilarious celebration of the infinite variety of human weirdness.

Michelle Lovric writes, researches, translates and designs anthologies and gift books. Her Love Letters – An Anthology of Passion was a New York Times bestseller. She has published three historical novels, one of which, The Remedy, was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction.