Thea Beasley

When Atlanta painter and stylist Thea Beasley first discovered her apartment, it needed rescuing. The local Board of Education had divided the 3,500-square-foot loft space into offices, before decamping in the 1960s. Beasley spent two decades creating her most personal masterpiece, uncovering warm, sand-coloured plaster beneath the peeling paint, and allowing it to remain as a bold distinguishing feature...

See more here 

Quagga

Simply calling Quagga a bookshop is trivialising its notability. I don't think there are sufficient adjectives in the thesaurus to adequately describe its worth. I have waxed on previously here. Put it this way, all I would need is a decent bed, and I could move in quite happily...

Photos by moi (Quagga: 86 Main Road, Kalk Bay, 7975 South Africa)

Specimens

This image depicts a drawer of Irish freshwater molluscs, a classification that includes snails, slugs, clams and squid. This is exactly how I would display a collection on a wall - love them jam-packed together...

Via here

Collections...

From a boat propeller to butterflies, bird nests and eggs, this is the wonderfully eclectic Victorian seaside cottage of antique dealer, Deb Kavaliunas. Her take on collecting...

“I suppose I’ve come to think of my style as being like a that of a museum, and the one constant element has always been the search for natural character — things that shine on their own merit, not because there is a brand name on it. The most special things are the ones that carry the weight of common history, everyday lives of everyday folk. Unfortunately, they’re highly covetable now, so they’re harder to find.”

Photography by Sharyn Cairns via here

Jack's Camp, Botswana

This is one of my ultimate dream-destinations: Jack's Tented Camp in Botswana. Situated in the Makgadikgadi Pans, which was once the largest inland sea in Africa, Jack's Camp is quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Fodor's describes it as follows:

If you're bold-spirited, reasonably fit, and have kept your childlike sense of wonder, then Jack's is for you. A cross between a Fellini movie, a Salvador Dalí painting, and Alice in Wonderland, this camp doesn't offer the cocooned luxury of some of the Okavango camps; it offers a more rugged, pioneer feel reminiscent of a 1940s-style safari...

MaÏssa Toulet

The amazing miniature museums of Parisian artist, MaÏssa Toulet...

(Workshop - by appointment - 89 Rue de Charonne, 77011 PARIS) Via here

Hidden Archives

Sometimes, one comes across an image or collection that leaves one open-mouthed. This is one of those instances. Joanna Ebenstein (founder of the Morbid Anatomy Blog and Library) has made it her quest to seek out and document...

untouched, hidden, and curious collections, from museum store-rooms to private collections, cabinets of curiosity to dusty natural history museums, obscure medical museums to hidden archives... with an eye towards capturing the poetry, mystery and wonder of these liminal spaces. 

The result? A photographic exhibition called The Secret Museum...

Cabinet of Curiosities of Bonnier de la Mosson, Paris

Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands, Established 1778

Comparative Telegraph Cables, Teylers Museum

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris

Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Collection, London (private collection)

Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Collection

Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Collection

Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Collection

Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Collection

More here

Obsolete

Uncommon objects; impossibly rare and infrequently found. If one can't breeze down to Obsolete in Main Street, Venice (CA), then a virtual thumb-through of the ever-changing inventory is mandatory. The mind boggles. Expect the unexpected... 

Anatomical chart depicting the nervous and sections of the skeletal system

Germany, circa 1831 (same as above)

Vascular Anatomical Chart of the Human Body (Germany circa 1880-1900)

Unusual color blue on paper backed linen (same as above)

Educational Anatomical Chart, France circa 1910

Another layer of the above chart

Detail from the above chart

Obsolete here

Mothtales

I have been completely enchanted by the images from the blog Mothtales. Blogger Ulla Norup Milbrath writes:

"Mothtales alludes to the ephemeralness of those lovely lowly creatures and the tales they spin in their worldly travels. Like the 'here today - gone tomorrow' aspect of the moth, and my own flights of inspiration..."

It is like being happily swallowed by a Pre-Raphaelite Grimm's meets Beatrix Potter with a pinch of Aesop. Painfully Exquisite and intricate. Here are a few of my favorites...

All images from here