Museum History

Capitol City's Natural History Museum is haunted—or at least that's what someone wants people to think. But Wilson Kipper, son of the museum's head paleontologist, knows better. When the mysterious occurrences go from spooky to dangerous, the museum is forced to close its doors. Can Wilson and his friends get to the bottom of things, or will the Natural History Museum be closed for good?

When a summer intern at the Preservation Society discovers an aged document hidden in the binding of an antique book, Society President Nell Pratt is intrigued by the possibilities: Is it a valuable historic document or just a useless scrap of paper? When analysis reveals that it's a hand-drawn map of one of Philadelphia's oldest neighborhoods, Nell learns that the area is being excavated for a new real-estate development and may hold long-buried secrets from the city's historic heyday.

Still reeling from the sudden death of her mother, Jess is about to do the hardest thing she's ever done: empty her childhood home so that it can be sold. As she sorts through a lifetime of memories, everything comes to a halt when she comes across something she just can’t part with: an old set of encyclopedias. To the world, the books are outdated and ready to be recycled. To Jess, they represent love and the future that her mother always wanted her to have.

The bestselling author of The Space Between Us and Reese's Book Club pick Honor delivers a powerful story about family secrets, a mother's power, and the importance of forgiveness. Remy Wadia left India for the United States long ago, carrying his resentment of his mother with him. He has...

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a British writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary critic. Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, several plays, plus 4,000 essays and newspaper columns. He was a columnist for the Daily News and The Illustrated London News.

London, 1895. Daniel Wilson and Abigail Fenton have been hired by the Natural History Museum to find out who deliberately smashed the fossilised skeleton of a small dinosaur. At first Daniel is reluctant to take the case, pointing out that they deal in murders, not vandalism. But then one of the attendants in the dinosaur room is murdered, his body found tied to a dinosaur skeleton and a note pinned to him saying 'The price of betrayal'. As Daniel and Abigail investigate, they must negotiate a web of legal and professional tensions.

New York Times bestseller Named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library, the Financial Times, the New York Post, Book Riot, and The Sunday Times (London). An “exquisite” (The Washington Post) “hauntingly beautiful” (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan...

The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress. Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum's lifeblood.

The “spellbinding” (People) New York Times bestseller from the author of The Dovekeepers, an extraordinary novel about an electric and impassioned love affair—“an enchanting love story rich with history and a sense of place” (USA TODAY). Coralie Sardie is the daughter of the sinister...

“A definitive and ideal biography—pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I’ve ever read.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times A critical darling, Crumb is the first biography of Robert Crumb—one of the most profound and influential artists of the 20th century—whose...

This collection contains: Twelve Years a Slave, Up from Slavery, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, The Life of an American Slave (Fifty Years in Chains), The Experience of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, and many more.

“Better and more comprehensive than any prior account. . . . Those of us who lived through those days will find the book cathartic; those rising generations who were too young to remember 9/11, or who weren’t yet born, will find it revelatory.” —John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11...

The sea is the largest museum on earth, with more than a million lost ships resting in its depths. Those shipwrecks date back thousands of years, some from civilizations long vanished, others from more recent history. Some are famous, others obscure and unremembered but each has a story to tell. In The Great Museum of the Sea, archaeologist, museum director, television host, journalist, and award-winning author James Delgado takes the listener on a personal tour of the world's wrecks, including many of the more than a hundred lost ships he has personally discovered and investigated.

Anarchism claims that there's no need for a state and that it would be better to have a society without central government. Anarchists dislike the authority of the state, but the dream of the stateless society is not a simple matter.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world's greatest and most brazen smugglers.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK From one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists, an important and timely work of cultural history that looks at the origins and much debated future of anthropology museums “A provocative look at questions of ethnography, ownership and restitution...

The fascinating and little-known story of the Louvre, from its inception as a humble fortress to its transformation into the palatial residence of the kings of France and then into the world's greatest art museum.

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police...

“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.” In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit...

The cowboy is an iconic figure in American culture. With his hat, boots, and trusty horse, the cowboy rides in at a moment of crisis to intervene against the forces of evil. In the 20th century, the cowboy of the Wild West took center stage in the realm of popular literature.