Iceland is bursting with cabinets of curiosities

Competition is stiff among museums in Iceland. The Phallological Museum in Húsavík, devoted to the penis, stands tall in a crowded field: 265 museums and public collections operate in a country of 330,000 — a population, incidentally, with the highest literacy rate in the world.

A. Kendra Greene, an American writer and artist, has worked in a number of museums, and her affection for them is touching. Indeed, it is the blurred edge between a few shelves in a front room and a civic institution that originally drew her to northern latitudes. She writes of Iceland:

I have never known a place where the boundaries between private collection and public museum are so profoundly permeable, so permissive, so easily transgressed and so transparent as if almost not to exist.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is structured around eight ‘cabinets’, each containing a ‘gallery’.