The Secret Museum of Mankind

January 26, 2008

The Secret Museum of Mankind is online, scanned in its entirety, with links to large versions of all the photos. Astounding.

Here’s the site’s description of the strange set:

Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index. Published by “Manhattan House” and sold by “Metro Publications”, both of New York, its “Five Volumes in One” was pure hype: it had never been released in any other form.

Advertised as “World’s Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs” and marketed mainly to overheated adolescents (see the 1942 Keen ad, left), it consists of nothing but photos and captions with no further exposition. This was not a book published to educate (despite appearing on some public library’s shelves), but to titillate (literally)– it’s emphasis was on the female form (”Female Beauty Round the World”) and fashion, and it featured as many National-Geographic-style native breasts as possible. But anything lurid, weird, or just plain unusual is fair game. This was a book to gawk at by flashlight under the bedcovers.

Another amazing find via BoingBoing, made better by the fact that I owned a single volume of this book many years ago, found in the abandoned remains of an old hunting lodge.

Tags: books, history, photographs, weird