The Secret Museum: Some Treasures Are Too Precious to Display...

This is the book we use when we know we have a wait such as a doctor's appointment. We keep it in the car so that we always have something interesting to learn. The stories on each item are a page or two and we haven't found one that doesn't fascinate. The other issue is that most of these items will never be put on display so what a great way to access knowledge with these little thumbnail sketches on such a variety of objects that sit in the vaults of museums. We have also used this book for the gift that will work for almost anyone who is curious.

Well written and laid out journey into the hidden mysteries around the world. What a treat to be taken on such a journey, discovering things we would not have the chance to see in one lifetime. I have since purchased this a number of times as a unique gift.

I bought this as a gift for a friend, based on a review. When I went to wrap it, I made the mistake of opening the cover...and two hours later still couldn't put it down. Every page has new discoveries, new information...the kind of thing you can open up anywhere and learn something amazing. Beautifully put together. Hope someone gives it to me as a gift one day soon!

An elegant, fascinating book about all the things, works of art, and very special items that don't make it into the main museum collection. Sometimes it's space issues, or selection, but sometimes the item in question is simply too delicate or too valuable to show to the sweaty public. Fun glimpse behind the scenes.

I mainly bought this for our Reader's Art Book Club which reviews only books about art. Many of this area [n.M.] are 'winter birds' and travel a lot of the rest of the time. A lot of us had already visited many of these different places. I will keep it instead of putting it our museum Library, so I can see places when I travel.

This could have been so much better. Riding on the huge current interest in museums the book sets out to explore the not very surprising fact that most museums do not have all their holdings on display. It then looks at some of these 'treasures'. Unfortunately neither the book's publishers nor the author were very clear about the audience for this work. So while its content can be 'adult' eg Nabokov's collection of butterfly penises - the whole thing is written in an irritatingly child-like style which went out of fashion with Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia.The design of the book is appalling. Each chapter is preceded by a gushy brief intro printed in a range of fonts - a style which would embarrass a high school project. The one thing which could have lifted the book - its illustrations - are remarkably bad. Aside from their amateurishness they are reproduced in such a small size as to be pointless. ( I'm talking about the hardback here) On a Kindle they are nothing but a smudge. The captions take banality to a new low. The author seems to have a genius for the trite.The book could have done with some proof reading eg the last Great Auk in Britain was killed in either 1840 or 1813 depending which page you read.The didactic urge is strong in all of us but here it seems to be allied to a strong belief that the reader - child or adult - must be spoken down to. The writer is a researcher for the television show QI and something of that show's assumption of superiority may have rubbed off.Not a complete waste of money but close to it. I would strongly recommend a potential buyer to go to Neil MacGregor's A History of the World in 100 Objects for an example of how this sort of thing can be done well.

The book itself was fairly interesting but some of the glaring errors in it made me wonder how many other facts were incorrect in the book. Three examples...the book states Pocohontas married John Smith. She most certainly did not. She married John Rolfe. The book states that the Titanic sank in 1921, nope 1912. Also the name last name of Francis and his daughter Frances Walsingham for some reason changes to Walshingham in the same paragraph. Considering that the book says that the author is a researcher on the show QI, I am amazed that she was allowed to get away with factual errors that obvious.Aside from that, I found the book interesting although I really wished there were less drawings and more photos of the objects she was describing. The photos were also quite small. I would have enjoyed seeing a large photo of things like Margot Fonteyn's tutu rather that a bunch of doodles of it.

Style and contents are both terrific. A must read if you are interested in historical information.