Ebook: Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology

Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science. Illustrations.

the MJT “infects its visitors with doubts—little curlicues of misgiving—that proceed to infest all [their] other dealings with the Culturally Sacrosanct.”

‘A gem of a book … by turns irony-laden and seriously charged … a witty, discursive exploration that manages to encompass the very idea of the museum itself.”
—Newsday
‘A brilliant meditation on human creativity.”
—New York magazine
‘Weschler is a nonfiction writer with a poet’s ear.”
—The New York Times Book Review
‘Teems with ambiguity and amazement.… The more we read of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the more dizzyingly vague is the border between illusion and reality.”
—Seattle Times
‘A delightful book whose plot is pure curiosity and whose subject is the beauty of things that can’t be known for sure.”
—Ian Frazier
“This is travel literature of the rarest, most elegant sort: a book that recounts a journey of the mind. Lawrence Weschler has ventured into the strange and murky zone between the real and the imaginary … and he proves to be an excellent guide, persuading us to follow him by the sheer force of his wit and an unflagging sense of wonder.”
—Paul Auster
“A small jewel of a book, as intricate and astonishing as the wonders it describes.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In this marvelous study of a bizarre museum and its self-mocking, polymath creator, Weschler finds an epiphany of that vast movement of discovery and wonder which created the first museums … and that heady state of mind—compounded of collection mania, mad taxonomy, imaginative exuberance, and naif wonder—which formed the prelude to modern science. I found it enthralling.”
—Oliver Sacks