Curious Shop Brochure

Joseph "Daddy" Standley (1854–1940) opened the shop at Second Avenue and Pike Street in 1899, charging no admission from the start. By 1904 he had moved to the ground floor of the Colman Ferry Dock — the hub of Puget Sound passenger ferry traffic — where it would remain for nearly sixty years. The brochure's cover calls it "Seattle's World Famous Waterfront Attraction"; the history text inside traces the founder's curiosity to a teacher who gave a child a prized wheat grain in an Ohio schoolroom during the Civil War.

The interior lists the standing marvels in breathless shorthand:

• the largest whale jawbone in the United States
• a naturally desiccated human mummy (the famous "Sylvester")
• narwhal tusks (the narwhal being an Arctic whale whose single spiral tooth was historically sold as unicorn horn)
• the Lord's Prayer inscribed on a single grain of rice
• Siamese-twin skeletons and a flea dressed in human clothing

Robert Ripley, of Believe It or Not fame, was a paying customer; a 1936 visit saw him spend $1,000 (roughly $21,000 today) on a totem pole and other pieces. The note that "Ripley's Name" appeared on a human hair plays directly to his readership.

George Gustav Heye, founder of the Museum of the American Indian in New York — whose collection later became the core of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian — appears inside as a character witness. Heye acquired ethnological material that had passed through the shop after the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle's world's fair. The address "Seattle 4, Washington" uses the postal-zone format (a city-delivery district number, forerunner of the ZIP code) introduced nationally in 1943, suggesting the brochure dates to the mid-1940s. The telephone exchange ELiot 3-1611 follows the pre-direct-dial convention in which the first two letters of the exchange name encoded the first two dial digits — a system phased out across the U.S. between the late 1950s and mid-1960s.