A History of the World in 100 Objects

Other museums should steal this idea. Sounds quite fun.

Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects is a sequence of 100 short essays about things in the British Museum and what can be learned from them. The essays began as notably successful radio broadcasts and have gone on to become an illustrated book.[*] The narrative is in the words, not in the look of the 100 objects – you don’t, it turns out, need the objects or even pictures of them in front of you. The descriptions are often better than the illustrations when it comes to characterising the objects, partly because MacGregor has handled many of the things he describes: he can, for example, tell us that a gold coin the size of a 1p piece sits ‘quite heavily’ in the hand. The pictures are reminders of the project’s scope: there are dull things (a bark shield), playfully intricate ones (a clockwork ship that tells the time and fires cannons) and a fair number of great works of art to read about. At roughly one page of illustration to four and a half of text there is no question of treating it as a picture book. The text is what draws you on. And, of course, you dwell less on the illustrations than you might partly because you know that all the objects are in the British Museum, each in its usual place (to find them ask for the numbered plan at the information desk), but partly because the descriptions are more useful.

The book isn’t for sale in the U.S., but there’s plenty of info form it on the BBC’s site for the project.

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