Benefactory

Like most cultural institutions, The MoOM needs the support of the community to survive. Well, not really, since we don't have a building or a staff or even those cheap little round colored badges that you hook on your collar when you attend, but we do hope you'll support The Museum of Online Museums all the same.

Becoming a "Sustaining Fellow" at a brick and mortar museum can cost well over a thousand dollars and often requires that you attend stuffy formal soirees and make small talk with muckety-mucks.

Supporting the MoOM requires a simple annual non-tax-free contribution of $25. In exchange for your generosity, you'll receive one sweet, tall coffee mug, a permanent listing and link as a member of the Board of Directors and the right, but not the obligation, to post links to collections you discover online that you deem appropriate to the Mission of the MoOM. Thank you in advance for your consideration

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Recently acquired but not-yet-collected exhibits, with descriptions, can be found in the MoOM Annex, a part of the general Coudal Partners archives.

Previous Exhibitions

In Western imagery, is there a shorter shorthand for evil than a high-sided, brightly colored, short-visored, adorned and braided, military officer's parade hat? I suppose somebody over there thought these looked cool, but the Colonel Hogans and the GI Joes of the last century were laughing behind their wool-covered backs. We all wore 'em the same over here, Jeep-style and green, so the Arkadys and the Borises wouldn't know whom to shoot at first.

The stereotype is that Canadians are a well-mannered people, preferring civil conduct and conversation to all the yelling and "hey, look at us!" chest-beating that goes on with their neighbors to the south. But while they might have us all fooled with this quiet act, a quick browse through Big Things: The Monuments of Canada explains that this is a country that prefers to let its massive army of gigantic, ominous statues do the talking. And that's far more intimidating than anything we've got.

The late Mitch Hedberg said, "Mr. Pibb is a poor imitation of Dr. Pepper. Dude didn't even get his degree!" Luckily, med schools over the years have been churning out pretenders to the Pepper throne, including Drs. Becker, Joe, Thirst, Right, Topper, Furr, Chek, and Kist, to name just a few. "Hello and welcome to the most important page on the internet." If that ain't enough, here's another list of would-be Peppers.

When the MoOM finally gets the National Public Radio slot it so richly deserves, we're going to spend a lot of time describing things, since most of our exhibits are visual. And then, of course, there are beautiful, touching, elegiac things like this Third Generation Nathan P5 recorded on the Norfolk Southern's Triple Crown Service that will make the show even more popular than A Prairie Home Companion. Speakers way, way up for The Locomotive Horn Sound File Collection.

I bought my jazz buff dad that Blue Note album cover book back when it came out, and he seemed confused about why I'd buy him a book full of life-size reproductions of the covers of 400 albums he already owned. Fair enough. So the next Christmas I stole it back and I've been ripping off Reid Miles' ideas ever since. Now, thanks to Vintage Vanguard's Blue Note Gallery I no longer need to carry the book around with me, and I can see the backs of all those records in their black-and-white Bodonitastic glory.

It's hard to imagine today's sophisticated kids saving up to buy trading cards portraying their favorite scenes from According to Jim. Funny thing is, I had dozens of these in the seventies--Charlie's Angels, Battlestar Gallactica, Welcome Back Kotter. The sad thing is I still have them.

From the educational-sounding Edith Cavell, Heroic Nurse to the risque-sounding Double Duty Nurse, Tiny Pineapple's Nurse Book Collection is proof that readers can't refuse a good book about a nurse. Or perhaps it just means nurses have a lot of downtime and like to read stories about more interesting nurses.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. It's easy to be sucked into a reverie about how things were "so much better when they were simpler." I generally don't buy that line of thought but when The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies made its way into the MoOM I looked at it fondly, but maybe for a different reason. Things weren't simpler when used these tools but maybe I was. Maybe I had a whole lot fewer preconceptions and maybe when I made something new, to me at least, it really was new. Hand me my loupe willya?

My particular brand in high school was the chromium dioxide TDK SA 90. I would buy them in boxes of ten, each cassette wrapped in black cellophane, a future mix tape waiting to happen. I found a bunch of those old mixes when I moved recently and looking over them I realized that they all contained pretty much the same thirty songs in a different order. Also my taste in music was pretty awful. Maybe I should have spent more money on new records and less money on blank tape. The Gallery of Audio Cassette J-Cards.

A MoOM classic that doesn't mess around with lots of subcategories and cutesy commentary, The Condiment Packet Gallery lays it all on the line right from the start. It's a simple, beautiful, clickable array of portion control packets, curated by Chris Harne and it's the kind of thing we point to when someone asks us, "What is the MoOM all about?"

Dutch illustrator Gertie Jaquet's assortment of orange wrappers started with her father-in-laws collection from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Despite the wide variety of designs, there's a strange consistency to the print quality, illustration style, and color palette (the notable lack of the color orange, for example), which makes one wonder if many of these examples were produced by a single design/printhouse uniquely equipped to serve the produce industry. Don't miss Gertie's other collections of ephemera.

I used to work in a studio where one of the suits had an office full of old Remington manual typewriters and he'd occasionally write memos on one of them. Invariably he'd make some reference to craftsmanship and how great things were in the old days. I thought he was daft and completely out of touch. Now, although I can't explain why, I really want a red IBM Selectric II. Damn.

It's so easy for you to make fun, isn't it? But do you laugh at seat belts? At smoke detectors? At the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Of course you don't. Yet each of those, in their way, serve the same purpose as those items listed and classified in the Webseum of Pocket Protectors: they keep people safe from harm. Why these indispensable slivers of plastic have all but vanquished the detriments of running ink and misplaced protractors. So who's laughing now?

Vans have taken a hit in recent years by being portrayed as the vehicles of choice for both terrorists and FBI sting operations alike. But in the 1970s, there were few things cooler in America than the van. And nowhere is that more clear than in The Gallery of Van Advertisements. Because nothing says, "I'm a man you want to get to know," than a 1973 Dodge Van, tricked out with Super Sports Radial Stones, plush captain's chairs from JCPenney and a psychedelic paint job of an electrified wolf riding a comet, howling at the moon. Good times.

Before the age of the 'product placement' and the 'viral video' there were straightforward, honest to God, celebrity endorsements. These print ads seem so innocent now, "I lived in Milwaukee, I ought to know..." This fine collection is part of a larger database of various and sundry ad images, curated by Chris Mullen.

Is Nicaragua really so hungry for heroes that they put G.K. Chesterton on a stamp? And nothing against Alfred de Musset but if he had been born in Maryland it's really hard to imagine the USPS putting his mug on legal tender. Same goes for Edward Lear. Norman Lear, on the other hand, I can see.

There are thousands of minuscule objects surrounding us at any given moment, most going relatively unnoticed in our day to day lives. Some are man-made, others are natural and a few even blur the line between the two. In an attempt to catalog these Very Small Objects a new system has been created using fragments of the English language rather than that archaic Latin everyone seems to cling to.

Created as promotional material aimed at a happy motoring public, this Collection of European Petrol and Oil Company Road Maps is nirvana for those of us who like nothing better than rooting around in big stack of vintage printed material, searching for gems. There's practical information here and most of it reminds us that there was as a time when touring was a hobby, people drove for pleasure and the crafts of cartography, iconography and typography had not yet been folded under the antiseptic term "information design."

Once the creepiness factor wears off (and it does, surprisingly quickly), the Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks at Princeton University, is a fascinating look at some of the most famous people in human history. Strip away all the veneer of what you've seen in those lavish paintings and ornately staged photographs used to codify their importance, and what you have left is just a regular, everyday person who happened to be extraordinary on the side.

Sometimes it's unclear if a MoOM collection is actually located in one physical place (whether it's a museum, a basement, or a shoebox), or if it's just a photographic collection of many items seen over the years, or found on the web. Until 2004, Sarah Lowrey actually owned over 1,000 vintage pocket transistor radios, and I like to picture them scattered around her house, all turned on and tuned to the same station. Side note: Sarah's husband Dave collects ham radio license plates.

Throughout human history, if there was one pick for "the greatest job ever," our selection would be the head of the toy section for the department store's Christmas catalog. Building dioramas every day, creating action packed scenes, and using more "Zaps!" and "Pows!" than is usually allowed by law. And once you're done, you couldn't hope to find a more adoring, appreciative audience for your work. There's no better place to relive that golden age, and wish you could have been a part, than at the Department Store Christmas Catalog Archive.

Everyone has a favorite media format. Most people just haven't thought it through yet. The Lost Formats Preservation Society has done an admirable job collecting many of these formats in silhouette and will consider adding other nominations. All hail the 2" video cart, used to play back spots and other interstitial programming at TV stations before things got boring and went all digital.

It must have been so easy to be a counterfeiter in the colonies. All you had to do was tear off a piece of paper and write "The pofsefsor of this note shall be intitled to 48 fhillings" and then scribble a crude picture of a pine tree or a water pump on the other side. And in exchange for this people would just hand over ale and blankets and long bore mufkets. They had a cushy life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, let me tell you.

Much of the MoOM revolves around the idea that "things were so much cooler back then." There's probably a long discussion to be had about innocence and fashion, but we're not going to have that here. Suffice it to say that in regards to girls and cars, "things were so much cooler back then."

One day, when outlawed historians of our society in decline meet in candlelit secret to determine what past event best represents civilization's high-water mark, they will agree it was decent food served on airplanes along with the proper utensils to eat it. We have tumbled far past that point already but it's not too soon to be nostalgic for the moment just after which everything went horribly, horribly wrong.

Less a "museum" than a "store," the Vintage Wallpaper Gallery is a German shop specializing in vintage (and reproduction) wallpapers. It's a great resource for ninth-graders making a Great Expectations diorama in a shoebox, or for anyone who just digs vintage patterns.

Sordid, racist, sexist, hokey, vile Men's Magazine Covers of the '50s and '60s. If that's not enough to get you to click, one of them teases a story called, "The Golden Nudes of the Mad Nazi Sculptor." Reprehensible really. Too bad the scans aren't bigger. Oh, and the interior illustrations are really tasteless too.

They are the unsung heroes of the American motorway, the saviors of those trapped in the gridlocked mess of noxious fumes and rising tempers. These self-sacrificing saints have spent upwards of $25 dollars per year to personalize their license plates, allowing us to try desperately to figure them out, thoroughly enjoying what would otherwise be tedious moments. We've laughed with them, cried with them, and so it only makes sense that they receive their due in the form of The Biggest License Plate Gallery Anywhere.

Here's how we believe it happens: You've made up your mind and you've decided to start a hobby. But everyone collects stamps or coins or those weird little spoons. So what's for you? Maybe after a bite of this apple, you'll think of something. Wait a minute! What's this sticker on the apple? There are probably a million stickers like this out there! And that's how a lifelong obsession begins and a site like The World of Fruit Labels is born.

These obsolete Japanese electronic products are nor particularly odd or even very old but most of them represent a confident design aesthetic with lots and lots of little buttons and switches. And that's good enough for us.

Found in an alleyway by Mike Lee and then lovingly preserved for posterity by Jen Sharpe, The Kriegsmann Files contain an amazing collection of 178 eight by ten promotional photographs of a variety of bands, magicians, strippers and other performers. Every picture truly tells a story, and if you're at all like us you'll spend hours imagining the tales that accompany these images.

Calendar cards are a great idea. You want to know the date, you pull it out of your wallet, take a look, and there you have it, there's the date. But it's all the better if you can take a look, then flip it over and be brainwashed by government propaganda. In the Calendar Card section of Vintage Chinese Propaganda Posters, you'll find such cute and cuddly gems as "I Love Work!" and "I Love To Be Clean!" They're the perfect gifts for the worker who stinks and isn't meeting their quota.

Who among us hasn't thought, at one time or another, "Sure I'd love to learn about France in the 1850's, but I really wish there was some way to incorporate frogs into my history lesson." Well wish no longer. At Le Musee des Grenouilles, you'll find just what you've been searching for as you take in all one hundred and eight dead frogs acting out "satirical scenes of everyday life."

I wonder if Russians are as nostalgic about their radios as we Americans are. Did they have shows that gathered them around their AM hearths like "Fibber Trotsky and Misha," and "Little Comrade Anna," and "Ukranian Top 40"? Or do they remember the attractive vintage receivers in the Museum of Old Soviet Radios as little more than countertop propaganda makers? Remind me to ask someone about that.

After a long day of buying off politicians, crushing enemies, and top secret meetings in the dank Skulls and Bones cave, most captains of industry enjoy coming home and leafing through their stock certificates, like those collected at The Bureau of Corporate Allegory. One look at the gigantic person towering over a city, holding a globe, looking totally disinterested, is a sure fire pick me up. If you're not sure why, that probably explains why you aren't a captain of industry.

The Shakespeare Kazoo Bug. The Rhodes Cork Revolution, The Case Rotary Marvel… My grandfather passed along many great lures to my father, and my father passed them along to me, and I lost all of them in the reeds of Lake Isabella. Luckily, they live on at oldfishinglure.com.

Designboom's Gallery of International Cigarette Pack Graphics is just about the perfect MoOM entry. It represents a single thing, executed thousands of times across time and geography and then collects them all together in one big browsable archive. Anybody got a match?

Gallery of screen captures of movie title pages, and tons of them. The thing here is that a designer worked and overworked a single phrase, to create a 'lock-up' of the film title and it's a great education and an inspiration to see them all in one place. Even if the movie sucked, in our eyes, occasionally redemption can be found in the execution of the title page art.

Judging early Harlequin paperbacks by their covers would probably create unfair expectations for the prose within. Known today for embossed and foil-stamped covers featuring flowery type, beefy shirtless men and corseted maidens, Harlequin had a more prurient beginning in full-on pulp fiction. Thompson Rare Books in British Columbia have an archive featuring all but a handful of the first hundred covers.

Imagine an America in which every Wal-Mart is independently owned and each boasts a name like Korvette's, Two Guys, Turn-Style, or Skagway. That America was called the 1960s, my friend, and the Museum of Sixties Discount Stores has preserved the era through photos, advertisements, and weirdly touching reminiscences.

Getting down to design essentials. You have a short headline, maybe just a name and a phrase. You have a simple, dramatic image. You have a blank page. Where to next? Sometimes you just need to overwhelm your eyes with layout after layout until something sticks. This collection of over 1,000 Blue Note Album Covers might be just what you need. Of course, the possibilty exists that once you're in there you might just forget altogether what you were working on.

Remember the times when selling four thousand greeting cards could land you a deluxe metal detector? Or, when you had a couple of bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you could easily have your own mini bike using "easy to build plans and instructions?" Take a trip down memory lane by visiting your parents' garage, seeing box after box of unsold seeds, weight-gaining powder, and Transformers knock-offs, the Trans-Bots (only $4.99! plus S&H!). The likely culprit for all this mess?

Most of us struggle to take vacation photos without power lines clogging up the landscape. Londoner Flash Wilson, meanwhile, has been collecting photos of Electricity Pylons Around The World. Her collection tops 500, from 35 nations. She's also the founder of The Pylon Appreciation Society ("It's funny how many people accuse me of being mad or geeky - and then they send me photos or ask for more information!") where the truly obsessed can sign up for access to the members-only content.

If you ever find yourself in the late 60's, early 70's, looking to make a telephone call, see if you can't find a Trimphone -- you'll look a lot more hip if you can. Described as "a new luxury in telephones" and "created in conjunction with the Council of Industrial Design," the phone was actually cleverly designed and, in an engineering sense, was well ahead of its time. Clean, simple, and remembered here in all its forgotten, innovative glory.

Ah, those carefree times when you could spend an evening under the stars, taking in a drive-in movie. A perfect night for you, your best girl, and a trunk full of your hooligan friends. Wisconsin Drive-In allows visitors to browse through hundreds of drive-in newspaper ads cataloged on the site, thereby helping to rekindle those fond memories (as long as you lived in Wisconsin and went to drive-in movies a lot). Some great films running, including the 1974 double feature, "Naughty Stewardesses" and "Fly Me" (tag: "See Stewardesses Battle Kung Fu Killers!").

One might think that fashion would play a big role in selecting exhibits for the MoOM, but fashion alone doesn't cut it. It's one thing to look great on a runway or at a fabulous premiere, it's another altogether to create a look that combines altitude and immersion protection without the bulkiness of a chest bladder. Like the Mark 1 Mod III, some versions of which were fitted with a gold lamé outer layer.

"Oh dear dear! Spheres, cylinders, checker planes and beautiful, beautiful raytraced colours. If you were in the middle of this glorious environment, where would you be exactly?" For a good laugh at 2 in the morning, venture on over to the Gallerie Abominate, a collection of really really bad 3D. From the exhibition: Mad Midget, Space Donkey and Depressed Rabbit Contemplates Imminent Ear Operation. The longer the render time, the longer the laugh.

How can you sum up an entire state or city into one single picture? Stick it in a water-tight plastic shell, add some fake snow and give it a good shake. Dome-O-Rama's worldwide collection shows an unhealthy obsession for tourism's single greatest contribution... the "Snowdome". From New york to Nag's Head North Carolina, this extensive collection will have you yearning for next year's vacation with the family. If you need a rental car for the next excursion across the country, try Celozzi-Ettleson Chevrolet, "Where you always save more money!".

"The weather is cold, damp and a bit dark. Wish you were here." Beautiful, serene, hand-tinted postcards lovingly scanned and presented. From the collector, Arnar Oskarsson, "The postcards in this collection were given to me by my grandmother, Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir, which inherited them when my grandfather, Jón Bekk Ágústsson died a few years ago. Most of them were sent between the years of 1903 and 1933 by relatives on his side of my family."

There are larger-but-less-weird and maybe even smaller-but-weirder collections of album covers on the web, but Show and Tell gets it right, with a fantastic balance of quantity and quality of weird album covers crossing all genres and design styles. They also started their own record label to bring some of the long-lost music on these long-out-of-print records to the CD age.

Associate Professor Joe Coelho of Culver Stockton College is the type of guy whose love for the physiological ecology of insects is eclipsed only by his love for rock and roll. I think we all have a few friends like that, but few of them have compiled hundreds of album covers featuring insects. The collection ranges from the well-known (Steely Dan's Katy Lied and Massive Attack's Mezzanine) to the obscure (Agent Steel's Mad Locust Rising and Galadriel's Chasing the Dragonfly). Of special interest are 32 albums by british prog rockers Barclay James Harvest, who were apparently reeeeally into butterflies.

The electronics revolution of the 1970s and 1980s burned an LCD image into our brains that fascinated us from day one. The Pocket Calculator Show celebrates the personal memories one has with integrated circuit-based consumer products. In the era where more buttons equaled better sales, the CompuChron All-LCD and Casio IF-8000 were the some of the hottest electronics money could buy.

For those who love the sea, who revel in the tang of salt air and the clean, vitalizing sunlight of the North Atlantic..." From a truly massive collection of Maritime Timetable Images. The good stuff is weighed in tonnage here. Björn Larsson's collection is notable for its size but more than that for the hundreds and hundreds of stunning illustrations and layouts included. The covers are great but don't ignore the 'click for a view of the interior' links either. Five stars.

A single industry. A single year. A single medium of communication. Specificity is a major factor in evaluating a collection for inclusion in the MoOM. Maybe nobody does ads for smelters anymore, at least ads that appear in places where we'll run across them, but in retrospect, the beautiful confidence of the layouts and the strength of the headlines and typography seems elegaic somehow and seeing them all together somehow foretells the fast-approaching end of an era.

Overconcern with one’s writing implement has long been considered self-indulgent, but Leadholder.com makes minute differentiation among drafting pencils seem like a practical necessity. Do I choose to advance my lead with a pushbutton spring clutch or a twist lock compression washer clutch? Will I require an all-metal model or a plastic barrel with metal fittings? A man’s answers to these questions define him in ways Myers and Briggs cannot. In the end, I prefer the usability and transparent design of a 1950’s model that shares a name with a CP intern.

Along with "Next Teller Please" the phrase "Close Cover Before Striking" is gradually fading into obscurity. And that's not completely a bad thing. As James Lileks has discovered, obscurity has its advantages. His The Matchbook Museum is not a comprehensive collection but the exhibits are great and "They’re chosen for their graphic design or peculiar imagery, or the sad tale you can infer by holding them between thumb and forefinger and listening closely."

Millions of times every year, a stranger enters a home using one of these as a pretext, and yet the average homeowner remains ignorant of its workings. What do any of us really know about those unrelenting little dials in the basement? The Watthour Meter Hall of Fame wants to set the record straight.

The Gallery of Classic Hockey Masks might be more useful to Wes Craven than Jocelyn Thibault. Invariably scary, these masks of NHL yesteryear reflect the gruesome nature of the sport, and the masochistic streak it takes to stare down a slapshot through a thin layer of absurdly painted plastic.

Applying the dust from sanded pencil leads to mylar film, entomologists create incredibly detailed, photorealistic insect illustrations for use in research. At the Gallery of Carbon Dust Beetle Illustrations you'll find a riveting intersection of the ugly and the beautiful.

Japanese Product: Design, Toys, Candy About as visually stimulating as a quick shopping trip can be.

Consider it poster art for nerds. The Gallery of Floppy Disc Labels This one is my favorite. For now.

The switchback evolution of Dead design is brilliantly organized at Grateful Dead Tickets, Passes and Laminates. I turned down a ticket to the July 9, 1995 show at Soldier Field. The Dead had played Soldier Field every summer since 1991, and I was sure they'd be back. I was wrong.

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