Why Doesn’t Iceland Have a Museum of Napkins?

It’s already there in the language: the way safn is both a collection and a museum, and part of the Icelandic word for library, and a term one might use to describe a group of sheep. It’s there, too, in how sets of things in the parlor have a way of moving outside the home—to sloping mountainside yards, to lakeside sheds, to downtown storefronts. It’s the Icelandic predilection for museums, for turning private collections into public displays—evident in places such as Petra’s Stone Collection, Sigurgeir’s Bird Museum, the Icelandic Phallological…

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