The Secret NYC Gallery that brought Picasso & the Avant-garde to America

Did they ever tell you about the nice Jersey boy who brought Modern Art to America’s shores? It wasn’t a Rockefeller, or a Guggenheim – just a kid from Hoboken, New Jersey with an eye for talent. Behind the doors of a little 5th floor attic-level apartment on 291 Fifth Avenue, he displayed raunchy Rodins,…

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Welcome to the Messy World of Jerry’s Junk

Staring out at you from behind those rusty gates; thousands of tightly packed, unwanted objects from the past sit in an eerie silence, almost as if they might just come alive as soon as you turn your back. Each and every single one has been collected by Kentucky’s King of Junk, who has made a temporary home for them…

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The Castaway Collector of Brooklyn

In Boerum Place, Brooklyn, New York lives a man in an apartment with many things. Chong Gon Byun is his name and he arrived in New York City from Korea 25 years ago. Your initial thoughts on Byun might be that he is an obsessive vintage gatherer, a flea market bargain hunter, a hoarder. But a closer…

Check out the Most Eccentric AirBnB Pad in NYC

Do you remember that time we discovered the ‘Museum of Every Object you can Probably Think Of‘– that old farming estate in Parma, Italy with an an archive of more than 60,000 everyday artifacts masterfully arranged around the old house? Well I think I just found its stateside equivalent right in the heart of Williamsburg, New York. Welcome to…

Victor Frankenstein Auctioning off His Cabinet of Curiosities?

It’s not too late to become a 19th century mad scientist! A curious auction of Antique Scientific Instruments has caught our eye at one of the largest and oldest auction houses in Europe. The Dorotheum in Vienna going since 1707, holds 600 auctions a year, but this particular event is certainly going to attract some pretty interesting collectors.…

How to Bribe Tom Hanks with a Vintage Typewriter

Aside from being one of the most loveable people on the planet, did you know that Tom Hanks was an avid vintage typewriter collector? He loves typewriters so much, he constantly posts pictures and videos of his latest acquisitions to his social media pages or of him typing away at various locations like the Eiffel…

The Obscure World of Kitschy Christian Vinyl

Bob Dylan nearly crossed over to the Christian music industry in the late seventies. He had just announced his conversion to Christianity in ’79 and proceeded to release a total of three albums based on his newfound faith. He spent several years touring and preaching from stage, but was never fully accepted by Christian music fans…

Offbeat Museum Tales: The Matron of Morbidity

“A true collector, a born collector, is an addict,” believes 80 year-old, Elinor Wrobel. The Syndey-based collector and art curator is head of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, a small and eccentric corner of the Sydney Hospital dedicated to preserving hundreds of human body parts collected from the hospital’s morgue over generations. “A former nurse, art…

One Guy spent the 1960s & 70s Collecting Paper Airplanes off the Streets of NYC

Harry Smith used to run out into the street to save a paper airplane he spotted from being run over by a yellow cab. One friend recalls him seeing one in the air and running after it, looking completely out of his mind. From 1961 to 1983, this eccentric collector found hundreds of airplanes that landed on the…

Cocktails in a Collector’s Museum: Lisbon’s Most Curious Bar

You know what museums are missing? Cocktails. Calling all collectors and oddity enthusiasts (that includes you), I’d like to present one of the world’s most eccentric bars, a veritable cabinet of curiosities if I’ve ever seen one, containing tens of thousands of fascinating objects housed in a former exotic grocery store-turned-drinking den. Antique soldiers, war memorabilia and…