Thursday, April 21, 2011

Geek night at the nerd museum

JenniferThe Nobel Museum in Stockholm must surely be, on normal days, one of the very most boring museums in the city. In general, I'm all for old-fashioned Museums—give me endless displays of obscure items accompanied by a page-sized placard of information, written in a far-too-small font, and I'm a happy camper. But at this museum, the relics from Nobel Prize winners are perhaps a little too obscure to be of immediate interest to all except the truly devoted. Take the display on Albert Schweitzer, for instance. It consisted of three children's books in Swedish, about Africa. The placard described Schweitzer's work briefly, mentioning that he had given several lectures in Sweden. At the very end, we learn the relevance of the books in the display case: these books were donated to the Museum by the some relatives of Schweitzer's friends in Sweden. See what I mean about tenuous connections to the artefacts?