Museum Store Aftershocks

Museum stores are one of the few retail environments in which I become both more discerning and more vulnerable. I go in thinking I’ll just have a look, and five minutes later I’ve connected to a packet of letterpress bookmarks, a tea towel featuring medieval rabbits, a postcard of an obscure 19th-century botanical study, and, of course, at least one pair of earrings I have never seen anywhere else

A good museum store extends the experience without flattening it. The best ones do not feel like gift shops. They feel beautifully curated and full of intelligent temptations. You have seen the exhibition, you have been dazzled, and then, just as you are preparing to return to ordinary life, the museum store appears and asks what you would like to take home to remind yourself of the magic inside these doors.

Museum stores have a particular genius for elevating the categories of things you did not know you cared about. Suddenly, you have opinions on pencils. You are comparing notebooks with the seriousness of a conservator. You are holding a reproduction of an ancient coin as a greeting card and considering whether your life has perhaps been lacking in paperweights of greater historical significance. This is a setting where wants and needs are intrinsically connected.

I love the optimism of museum-store objects. They assume a person might still want a well-made set of vintage postcards, an exhibition coffee table book, a box of colored pencils, a ceramic dish with a little bird on it, a pair of socks featuring a Baroque ceiling. They suggest that our daily lives might be improved by better paper, better design, and the artful refrigerator magnet.

Of course, museum stores also understand the psychology of aspiration at an almost surgical level. They know that after spending an afternoon looking at genius, antiquity, devotion, craft, or ruin, one is especially susceptible to buying a tote bag.

But that is why I’m fond of them. A museum store, at its best, isn’t merely selling souvenirs. It offers aftershocks. A way to carry some fragment of the encounter back into ordinary time. A postcard tucked into a book, a print hung in the hall, a ridiculous and wonderful ornament you would never have found anywhere else. Small proofs that delight (and whimsy) need not be confined to the gallery wall. (You can even wear some of your museum store treasures on your ears.)

[Photo of my daughter’s dog, Mozie, at the San Diego Natural History Museum]