The Secret Museum of Mankind website, the "World's Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs"

Ian Macky says: "Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index. Published by 'Manhattan House' and sold by 'Metro Publications,' both of New York, its 'Five Volumes in One' was pure hype: it had never been released in any other form."

Three million cheers to Macky for not only scanning all 564 pages of this treasure of a book, but for cleaning up the images, transcribing the text, and adding thumbnail galleries and a copy of a 1942 magazine ad.

Cannibals. Fakirs. Equilibrists. Crime and punishment. Rituals. Slaves, cults and customs. Warriors and weapons. Musicians and mendicants. Dance, dress, undress and body modification. Structures, conveyances, beasts, and more breasts than you can shake a stick at! This is The Secret Museum of Mankind.

Advertised as "World's Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs" and marketed mainly to overheated adolescents (see the 1942 ad in Keen, left), it consists of nothing but photos and captions with no further exposition. This was not a book published to educate (despite appearing on some public library's shelves), but to titillate (literally)-- it's emphasis was on the female form ("Female Beauty Round the World") and fashion, and it featured as many National-Geographic-style native breasts as possible. But anything lurid, weird, or just plain unusual is fair game. This was a book to gawk at by flashlight under the bedcovers.

Link

• [MrBaliHai]

  I suspect that a lot of these images were lifted directly from National Geographic. I recognized a couple of them from the December, 1921 “Islands of the Pacific” issue, which I own.

• [Pulpio]

  I attempted to track down the origins of this fascinating slice of Americana several years ago for the Village Voice.

  http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/vls/162/gehr.shtml

  You can still pick up fairly inexpensive copies of the original on eBay. They come in a wide variety of tints and editions.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Can do!

• [igm]

  The Secret Museum is down temporarily: my hosting company cut it off, too much pummeling of the shared server. It will be back later today with higher capacity.

• [igm]

  Kieran: this is a common book, easily available, cheap. Anyone who wants to use the images for commercial purposes can just buy their own copy and have at it.

  Yes, the copyright status *is* questionable. EVERYTHING about it is questionable. It would be great if the author/publisher came forward and told me to cease & desist, then I’d know who it was.

  I have donated images to the Wikipedia commons before; if someone requests a specific image donation from the Secret Museum, I would surely comply.

  Finally, I highly recommend this article for an educated take on the biases of the times.

• [Svenski]

  Well, there goes the rest of the day at work. This is an absolute treasure trove.

• [igm]

  Everything’s copacetic now at The Secret Museum of Mankind. Wish I could edit my previous comment and remove that IP address!

• [Erin314159]

  As an anthropologist, I love looking at the racist early popular anthropology as a window into evolving Western attitudes. Also, a quick search on amazon for the book title reveals a series of music recordings from 1925-1948 called “The Secret Museum of Mankind: Ethnic Music Classics.” They seem to be arbitrarily jumbled playlists of a wide variety of world music and they look good.

• [igm]

  wroberto, as I said in the intro, “don’t take it seriously and don’t believe a word it says”. Think of the photo commentary as that of a sideshow barker. Would you believe what a carny barker says?

  I don’t see where the Arunta are described as being from New Guinea, tho. Where do you see that?

  MrBaliHai, can you check your National Geographic and see if the photos which come from there have matching captions as well?

• [SamLL]

  This link seems broken. I’m getting a 403 error.

• [dougrogers]

  Link is broken :-( Not all is racist. I found some good old pictures of Nepal. http://dougrogers.wordpress.com/

• [bobkat]

  link is broken

• [mike h]

  (RE: Svneski) I agree that it’s a treasure trove, but it would be nice if there were some way to search or index the site. It seems as though we must view everything in order to view what we might be interested in viewing.

  If not, I would be happy to hear otherwise!

• [igm]

  The Secret Museum is back up here; still waiting for nameservers to catch up with changed hosting.

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  Hmmm … I’m wondering about the copyright status. He’s licensed it with a CC-NC 3.0 license, but if it was published in 1935 it must surely still be under the copyright of the original author (whoever that may be).

  It’s also a little frustrating that he chose the Non-Commercial version. That makes it incompatible with Wikipedia.

  Wait, what am I saying – the book has no copyright. That means that the images are faithful two-dimensional reproductions of public domain images, and therefore in the public domain themselves (at least in the US and some European countries – excluding the UK).

  *sigh*

  Of course, it remains to be seen whether photos can be found that do not convey the intrinsic racial bias of the book.

• [Moon]

  A DANGEROUS BEAUTY IN SULLEN MOOD
  She has stood, until weary of attracting attention, by a wall in Biskra, this geisha of the Sahara, with her hard-won dowry of gold and silver adorning her person. She can sing Arab love-songs, play flute, hautboy, and zither, and dance more seductively than girls of any other tribe. Her skill in making cigarettes and coffee is famous, and all her charms and accomplishments are for hire

  A little scandalous, don’t you think?

  Hahahaha! Page 7 of the Africa volume for the picture

• [Merlinhoot]

  http://ian.macky.net/ just take away the secretmuseum part of the URL and it works

• [wroberto]

  Don’t rely on anything being factual in this volume.

  For example, the Arunta are described as being from New Guinea, when in fact they are in the central Australian desert.

• [EvilTerran]

  #2 – the “A-Z” link between the back and forward buttons take you to an index.