While there are more than 15,000 museums in our country, visitors get to see only about five percent of any institution's collections. Most museums simply don't have room to display everything they've got. However, there are a wide variety of surprising and intriguing reasons why, for example, the Smithsonian Institution doesn't display its collection of condoms; why the Field Museum locks up its shrunken heads; and why the bones of a former slave named Fortune were hidden away for years in the basement of Connecticut's Mattatuck Museum. Each item or collection included in this volume is be described and placed in context with stories and interviews that explore the historical, social, cultural, political, environmental or other circumstances that led to that object being kept from view--the ultimate museum buff's voyeuristic experience.
