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1001 Curious Things: Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and Native American Art

By Kate C. Duncan
University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, U.S.A., 2000.
273 pp., cloth.
ISBN 0-295-98010-9.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart , IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net


This is a fascinating account of a celebrated tourists' haunt, called Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, on the waterfront in Seattle. Founded in 1899 by Ohio-born curio collector Joseph E. "Daddy" Standley, it was a shop where one could buy genuine Native American handicrafts (carvings, baskets, blankets, moccasins, masks, totem poles), while also being entertained by various "cabinets of curiosities" which featured bogus shrunken heads, phony mermaids, costumed fleas, armadillo sewing baskets, and other dubitable exotica. Robert L. Ripley, author of Ripley's Believe It or Not!, was a frequent visitor, and often purchased items for his cartoons and lectures. Of the book's historic photographs, one of the most interesting is a page spread from Standley's guest book (p. 24), in which news clippings, postcards, and other collage materials are spontaneously combined with diary entries, anecdotes, and signatures of famous guests, among them Charlie Chaplin, Theodore Roosevelt, Will Rogers, and Katherine Hepburn. For more than a century, the shop (which still exists, at a new location on Pier 54 in Seattle) has functioned as a retail store, a museum of exotica, and a crossroads for people with interests in unusual phenomena, including B.J. Palmer (founder of the Palmer Chiropractic College, who designed a grotto in Davenport, Iowa, called A Little Bit O' Heaven), and Father Paul Dobberstein (creator of the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa), both of whom used shells and other objects supplied by Ye Olde Curiosity Shop in constructing unusual settings in which to meditate.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 16, No. 3, Spring 2001.)

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Updated 4 May 2001.




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