Culture Vulture Gallery Archive

Culture Vulture Gallery Archive A treasure trove of Antiques, Vintage memorabilia, Art, Maps, Glassware, Brassware, Pewter, Games...

THEY DIED. WE MADE MEDALS.Wars were won. Cities burned. Monarchs died. Presidents were assassinated. And someone struck ...
16/09/2026

THEY DIED. WE MADE MEDALS.
Wars were won. Cities burned. Monarchs died. Presidents were assassinated. And someone struck a medal.
The latest in our Coins and Medals series explores how victory, grief, faith, disaster and death became objects people could hold, keep and collect. From Purple Hearts and Waterloo to coronations, pilgrimage badges and the Great Fire of London, these tiny objects carry enormous histories.
Coins tell us what people spent.
Medals tell us what they refused to forget.

War, Disaster, Mourning and the Strange Human Need to Keep a Piece of History

Not Legal Tender. Still Spent.Not quite money, but often every bit as useful. Tavern tokens bought pints, transport toke...
13/09/2026

Not Legal Tender. Still Spent.
Not quite money, but often every bit as useful. Tavern tokens bought pints, transport tokens got commuters across cities, communion tokens opened the way to the sacrament, company scrip controlled where wages could be spent, and jetons turned calculation and administration into miniature works of art. These small, often overlooked objects carried value through trust, necessity, membership and local custom rather than the authority of a mint.
For collectors, that is exactly what makes them irresistible. A battered brass disc can lead back to a vanished pub, a railway company, a church congregation, a factory town or an entire neighbourhood. Coins tell us what governments declared to be money. Tokens tell us what ordinary people actually used to get through the day.

Tokens, Tickets and the Parallel Currencies of Everyday Life

You Think It’s Just a Coin. Look Again.Most people see a face, a date and a denomination.Collectors see the owl, the min...
09/09/2026

You Think It’s Just a Coin. Look Again.
Most people see a face, a date and a denomination.
Collectors see the owl, the mint mark, the motto, the engraver’s initials, the heraldry, the edge inscription and the tiny symbol that changes the entire story.
Athena’s owl identifies Athens. Brutus’s daggers and liberty cap turn assassination into propaganda. A CC mint mark moves a Morgan dollar to Carson City. MCMVII and a missing motto define Saint Gaudens’s Ultra High Relief. Even the edge of a coin can carry the most important message.
You Think It’s Just a Coin. Look Again.
The real value is often hiding in the smallest detail.

The Symbols, Animals, Mottos and Clues Hiding in Plain Sight.

Every Time You Spent It, You Saw Who Ruled YouThe face on your money was never just decoration.For centuries, kings, emp...
06/09/2026

Every Time You Spent It, You Saw Who Ruled You
The face on your money was never just decoration.
For centuries, kings, emperors, presidents and revolutionaries have used coins, medals, banknotes and seals to make power portable. Augustus stayed eternally young. Louis XIV turned victories into medallic mythology. Charles I, Cromwell and Charles II used portraiture to argue over who had the right to rule. Revolutionary France removed the king and replaced him with Liberty. Napoleon borrowed Rome. The early United States avoided presidents altogether and put ideals and national symbols in their place.
For collectors, that is where things become fascinating.
A crown, laurel wreath, eagle, Liberty cap, altered title or deliberately erased face can tell you as much as the portrait itself. Sometimes the damaged coin has the better story. Sometimes the reverse is where the real propaganda lives. Sometimes a regime change can be seen in something small enough to lose down the back of a sofa.
Every Time You Spent It, You Saw Who Ruled You.
Power did not need a billboard.
It had your pocket.

Kings, Emperors, Presidents and the Politics Hidden in Plain Sight

You’re Looking at Money. No, Really.Before money looked like money, we spent shells, weighed metal, recorded debts on st...
02/09/2026

You’re Looking at Money. No, Really.
Before money looked like money, we spent shells, weighed metal, recorded debts on sticks and even used porcelain as currency.
Cowries crossed continents. Gold rings blurred the line between jewellery and wealth. Chinese spade money borrowed its form from tools. London tradesmen issued their own tokens. Then came the stamp, transforming metal into officially recognised value.
For collectors, these objects are far more than curiosities. They preserve histories of trust, trade, power and the wonderfully strange things humans have agreed were worth something.

The Shells, Sticks, Rings and Other Strange Objects People Once Trusted as Currency

The Archive Is LyingThe cabinet never disappeared. It just got better at pretending to be objective.From Joseph Cornell’...
30/08/2026

The Archive Is Lying
The cabinet never disappeared. It just got better at pretending to be objective.
From Joseph Cornell’s poetic boxes and the Bechers’ photographic typologies to Susan Hiller’s archival vitrines, Mark Dion’s museum ready rubbish, Zoe Leonard’s disappearing shopfronts and Walid Raad’s deeply unreliable archive, contemporary artists have turned collecting itself into a subject of suspicion.
These works ask uncomfortable questions. Who decides what gets preserved? Who writes the label? Why does a photograph suddenly become evidence once it enters an archive? What gets classified, what gets forgotten, and what happens when the system looks authoritative but the story is incomplete, manipulated or entirely invented?
For collectors, that makes the contemporary cabinet especially compelling. The artwork may be a photograph, a vitrine, a book, a box, a filing system, a sequence or an entire archive. The object matters, but so does the structure around it.
Because sometimes the most important thing in the cabinet is not what has been collected.
It is the system that convinced us it belonged there.

What artists know about museums, memory and manufactured truth.

They Collected the World. They Just Forgot to Ask Permission.The cabinet of curiosities was never just a room full of wo...
26/08/2026

They Collected the World. They Just Forgot to Ask Permission.
The cabinet of curiosities was never just a room full of wonders. It was also a record of who had the power to take, buy, classify, display and keep. Behind the bronzes, sacred objects, human remains and so called ethnographic specimens that filled European and American collections are histories of conquest, colonial trade, grave robbing, scientific racism and transactions in which consent was often little more than a convenient fiction.
From Benin City and Maqdala to the Morton Collection, Ota Benga and the ancestral remains now being returned from London, New York and Philadelphia, They Collected the World. They Just Forgot to Ask Permission. follows the uncomfortable routes by which people and cultures became collectable. But this is not an argument for emptying every museum or declaring every historic collection stolen. It is about asking the question collectors were once rarely expected to ask: how did this get here? Because provenance is more than a pedigree, legal ownership is not always ethical ownership, and sometimes the most important chapter in an object’s history begins when someone finally decides to give it back.

Empire, Looting, Human Remains and the Uncomfortable Truth Behind the Cabinet of Curiosities

Mermaids Were Fake. The Money Was Very Real.They bought mermaids. They displayed dragons. They paid fortunes for unicorn...
23/08/2026

Mermaids Were Fake. The Money Was Very Real.
They bought mermaids. They displayed dragons. They paid fortunes for unicorn horns that were, rather inconveniently, whale teeth.
The cabinet of curiosities was never merely a collection of strange things. It was where science, folklore, ambition, craftsmanship, misunderstanding and outright fraud were shoved into the same glass case and told to get on with it. From the Horniman’s magnificently grim manufactured merman and Harvard’s FeeJee Mermaid to Jenny Hanivers fashioned from rays, Aldrovandi’s dragons, Dürer’s wonderfully inaccurate rhinoceros, the Tradescant dodo and narwhal tusks once worth princely sums, the line between monster and marvel was often thinner than anyone cared to admit.
And that is precisely what makes these objects so irresistible to collectors now. A fake mermaid can be an authentic piece of nineteenth century history. A wrongly identified tusk can reveal centuries of trade, medicine and belief. A creature once dismissed as impossible can turn out to be a platypus.
Sometimes the fraud is the fascinating bit. Sometimes the mistake becomes more valuable than the truth. And sometimes nature turns out to be considerably stranger than anything a very inventive bloke with a dead fish and some papier mâché could dream up.
Welcome to the cabinet where nothing is quite what it seems.

How unicorn horns, manufactured monsters, mythical beasts and spectacular frauds became some of the most desirable objects in the collector’s cabinet.

This Should Not Be PossibleSome of the most extraordinary objects ever made are also some of the easiest to miss.Prayer ...
19/08/2026

This Should Not Be Possible
Some of the most extraordinary objects ever made are also some of the easiest to miss.
Prayer nuts carved with entire biblical scenes. Netsuke barely larger than a fingertip. Snuffboxes hiding portraits inside their lids. Lacquer, mother of pearl, bone, hardstone, glass, gold, wood, all worked on a scale that makes you wonder how anyone had the patience, eyesight, or nerve to pull it off.
Small Wonders looks at the miniature objects collectors have obsessed over for centuries, not because they were small, but because of how much craftsmanship, meaning, and sheer excess could be packed into so little space.
These were objects meant to be carried, opened, handled, worn, gifted, and shown off. And the closer you get to them, the more ridiculous the level of detail becomes.
Sometimes the smallest thing in the cabinet is the one you end up staring at the longest.

The Tiny Masterpieces That Took Craftsmanship Beyond Reason

The World Was Too Big, So They Bound ItWhat if the greatest luxury object in your library wasn’t a painting, a sculpture...
16/08/2026

The World Was Too Big, So They Bound It
What if the greatest luxury object in your library wasn’t a painting, a sculpture, or a jewel, but the entire world bound between two covers?
From Gessner’s strange menagerie of real and mythical creatures to Fuchs’s medicinal plants, Besler’s impossible gardens, Blaeu’s monumental atlases, Merian’s Surinamese insects, Catesby’s American wildlife, Edwards’s exotic birds, Audubon’s life size spectacles, and Morikuni’s Japanese encyclopaedia of nature, rare books allowed collectors to possess what they could never hope to see firsthand.
These were never simply reference books. They were status symbols, scientific instruments, works of art, records of exploration, and portable cabinets of curiosities. Flowers, birds, insects, coastlines, unfamiliar animals, and entire continents were engraved, coloured, classified, and brought into the library for the curious, the wealthy, and the magnificently obsessive.
But every beautiful page carries another history too: empire, trade, local knowledge, extinct species, changing ideas of science, and generations of owners who left their marks in bindings, bookplates, annotations, repairs, and stains.
Before collectors could travel the world, they bought it in folio.
And some of the most astonishing attempts to own everything are still sitting quietly on bookshelves.

Rare Books, Exotic Nature and the Collector’s Obsession with Owning Everything

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