Curiosities & Oddities
The strange and specific: ethical taxidermy with documented provenance, Victorian mourning ephemera, mechanical fortune tellers, wax anatomical models, and objects too odd to catalog elsewhere. All acquisitions come with a chain-of-custody note where one exists.
Coin-operated fortune-teller by Mills Novelty Co., Chicago. Feeds a penny, dispenses one of 96 printed fortunes.
French singing bird box by Blaise Bontems. Lid springs open; feathered bird sings, turns, and blinks before retreating.
Yellow gold and black enamel mourning brooch containing a plaited-hair miniature. Reverse engraved 'Elizabeth · aet. 34 · 1871'.
Graduated faceted Whitby jet beads on a barrel clasp. Warm to the touch, as true jet always is.
Edwardian glazed display case of six iridescent Blue Morpho butterflies, pinned and labelled in period copperplate.
Antique red squirrel mount posed on a lichen-covered branch beneath a hand-blown glass dome, on ebonised base.
Chromolithographed advertising broadside for a nineteenth-century patent 'kidney, liver and bladder remedy'.
A single-family archive of forty-seven black-bordered mourning cards spanning twenty-four years of Ohio deaths.
A 9-inch fragment of narwhal tusk, engraved with a whaleboat scene and inked in the manner of mid-century American scrimshaw.
A German pupil-teaching model of the human eye, roughly ten times life size, disassembles into seven hand-painted parts.