Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson · 15 Nov 2016 · 322pp · 88,197 words
seventy thousand objects, which he bequeathed to King George II. Sloane’s collection was a particularly accomplished version of what the Germans called Wunderkammerns—literally, “cabinet of wonders.” Wunderkammerns were small shrines to the gods of miscellany, featuring ancient coins, trinkets, embalmed mummies, daggers, rhinoceros horns, and the like. No organizing principle
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’s Encyclopédie and the Encyclopaedia Britannica both emerged from the ethos of the collector. In a famous passage from The Prelude, Wordsworth drew upon the Wunderkammern as a metaphor for his desultory intellectual pursuits at Cambridge as a young man: I gazed, roving as through a cabinet Or wide museum (thronged
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apes that lived in Africa had fascinated Europeans for centuries, and a handful of skeletons and specimens mounted by taxidermists had appeared in museums and Wunderkammerns; but until Jenny and Tommy’s arrival, none of the great apes had survived a sea voyage to England. The public’s interest in Jenny
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of the Dutch regime Bandanese people of the Spice Islands, 119 Caribbean, 120, 120–21 Burrows, Edward G., 234 Burton, Mary, 235 “cabinet of wonders” (Wunderkammerns), 255–57, 256 caffeine as a memory enhancer, 247–48 as a natural weapon of the coffee plant, 247 calico “Calico Madams,” 28 made popular
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, 38 Williams, Tennessee, 243 Wilson, E. O., 260 Winchester, Simon, 18 Wordsworth, William, 257–58 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 53 writing machines, 87–88, 89–90 Wunderkammerns (“cabinet of wonders”), 255–57, 256 Zimmer, Carl, 247 Zola, Émile, 43–44 zoo, the bringing the exotic close, 267–68 Darwin’s ideas about
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
by Joel Mokyr · 8 Jan 2016 · 687pp · 189,243 words
, began to acquire a more positive meaning. The “hunt for knowledge” of the rare and the freakish was displayed in the proto-museums known as wunderkammern. Weird and exotic exhibits were displayed in these “cabinets of curiosity” and people were invited to gawk (Eamon, 1991, p. 34). Slowly but certainly the
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, 216, 218, 248, 270, 272, 318 World Values Survey, 13 Worm, Ole, 158, 240 Wotton, William, 95, 198, 253 Wren, Christopher, 87 Wright, Thomas, 222 wunderkammern, 153 Wuthnow, Robert, 174, 180, 276 Xu Guangqi, 326, 328, 333 Xue, Melanie Meng, 294, 327 Xunzi, 298, 319, 330 xylography, 293 Yan Roju, 328
Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
by Dennis Yi Tenen · 6 Feb 2024 · 169pp · 41,887 words
that Llull (pronounced yooy) inspired Francis Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz to propose their binary cypher systems, influenced also by the Chinese tradition? What about the Wunderkammern of the German baroque poets in the seventeenth century? These curious drawer cabinets—literally furniture—could be pulled in any arrangement to produce beautiful music
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, 59, 61, 62, 79, 115, 122–24, 138 writing bots, 136–37 writing machines, 9 writing systems, 42–43 Writing the Short Story (Esenwein), 71 Wunderkammern, 10 Wurzburg, Germany, 30 Xerox Palo Alto, 92 Ya Jing, 9 Yale University, 92, 94 Yngve, Victor, 87–92, 96, 108, 109 zairajah, 18–22
Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
by Austin Kleon · 6 Mar 2014 · 55pp · 17,493 words
you.” —Paul Arden If you happened to be wealthy and educated and alive in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, it was fashionable to have a Wunderkammern, a “wonder chamber,” or a “cabinet of curiosities” in your house—a room filled with rare and remarkable objects that served as a kind of
The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories
by Edward Hollis · 10 Nov 2009 · 444pp · 107,664 words
, and draped with thick Turkey carpet. There were tall cabinets, brass candelabra, and tapestries that depicted the virgin and the unicorn. His rooms became crowded Wunderkammern. Shut off from the blazing light and the scented breezes of the gardens outside, they felt more like chambers in a tower in a Teutonic