The Zymoglyphic Museum as seen through other eyes

San Jose Mercury News article
May 3, 2002

You'll discover there are no secrets
in his Cabinet of Curiosity
His Zymoglyphic Museum
Where Evolution is Creation
Creation is Evolution
The result is always Poetry
Take a walk around the neighborhood
and try not to wake up
Or you'll miss the wonderful beauty
of the place
The university of dreams, your continuing 
education of this earthly cosmos
You arrive a guest and you leave
a member of the family
Whether you admit it or not.

Poems on the Spot
Book Arts Jam
October 16, 2011
by Robert Perry

The delights provided us by the Zymoglyphic Museum's myriad selections, and even by the relatively elaborate annotations and codifications with which the Museum provides its holdings, are themselves self-evident. The poetry of form, lyricism of association, and economy of function that define every concatenation, that pervade every diorama, rivet us to these apparitions, cementing our fascination and our affection.

From The Art World Beneath Our Feet: The Zymoglyphic Museum and its Mission by Peter Frank.

The Museum as Photogenic Muse


A gallery of photographs of the museum by artist-in-residence Judith Hoffman, using a variety of photographic techniques It is made of some deep thoughts, some random junk and some accumulated stuff ...It is a place to meditate on life and death.

Photographs by Museum Visitors


A gallery of photographs taken by visitors during various open days at the museum

A Journey Through the Museum


A photo essay by Laura Mappin you feel your head getting sucked into the middle of the earth.

Sketches by Visitors

Heng Hua Wang	Conni Rizzuto	Pierre Uszynski	Pierre Uszynski
Members of Sketchcrawl Silicon Valley came by in March of 2012.

Diorama Videos


A pair of diorama videos taken by Kathryn Gritt on Obscura Day 2010

Honors and awards

Official KFJC Cool, Secret Place: Presented on-air May 5, 2012 on The Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show by Robert Emmett, host
Wacky website of the day: Sept. 20 on the Wacky Web Sites Page-A-Day Calendar 2007

Selected quotes

Great art: [T]he Zymoglyphic Museum is one of the 20th century's great art works (alongside of Museum of Jurassic Technologies) -- just shamefully unrecognised. -- Incognita Nom de Plume
World's finest: The Zymoglyphic Museum - The world's finest collection of artistic detritus -- Urban Cryptids
A new generation: I wanna be a Zymoglyphic Art Museum Curator when I grow up. -- Magnafeek
Enthusiasm!: occupies a place somewhere along the line between Cornell and The Brothers Quay. -- A novelty choking hazard
Connecting: Connecting the world with dead things and junk. -- Jeanie M.
Is this thing real?: Controversy about a hallucinogenic mushroom specimen in the museum's natural history collection
Spare oddities: [The dioramas] are kind of like an obscure and evil I-Spy book, with lots of hidden actions and creatures. Also, this website is absolutely crazy -- Curious
My favorite aquarium: If I had the nose to live in the dust, the General would not be me who would then complain about the ecology and everything possible to speculate and involuntary, so this is my favorite aquarium. Only one club tent in the middle, no glattgeschliff'nes glass, brown algae covers in just outside. And then it would dawn and gush to the ceiling. -- Wonnegrausen [Google translation from German]
The torch of entropy: La fiaccola dell'entropia! La fiaccola dell'entropia! -- L'Ascella Ebbra [The Drunken Armpit]
Eyewitness accounts: weird little collection...in a beat-up wooden shed in some dude's driveway -- Schmoo on Obscura Day 2011 [ed. note: The shed is not nearly as beat-up as museum management might prefer]; It's this middle-aged weird dad guy in the suburbs...but it's still very cool -- Obscura Day 2012
Chuffed pink: today I discovered I'm a zymoglyphile...I'm chuffed pink to have found the proper name for my condition -- poetmcgonagall
Literary inspiration: The museum provides a "mysterious object" for some creative tales

The Museum of Dust

The Museum of Dust is a shadowy, incorporeal, antitpodean meta-institution that attempted to acquire the Zymoglyphic Museum for its Wunderkammer collection in 2006. It has since returned to its original mission of "gathering dust."

As seen through other eyes