Suppose you went into a museum and you didn't know what it was.

From the first sentence of this brilliant book, Jan Mark inspires us to think.

She muses on the Muses and the word museum, on why and how people collect things, on different kinds of museums (cabinets, buildings, villages, towns), on their contribution to science and on the notion of classification.

She examines the Elgin Marbles (saved or stolen?), famous fakes, the dodo, and some great collectors.