Smells like dead.
So my New York adventures continue with a trip to Obscura Antiques & Oddities. You may remember my post from a few months back in which I interviewed Obscura’s Ryan Matthew. He and the store are featured in Science Channel’s Oddities. Since I only knew about the store from this TV show, and from the interview, Zach and I decided to go check it all out in person.
Everything in New York opens super late, which we weren’t aware of. Heading to Obscura, we saw Ryan Matthew sitting on the steps outside. We breezed past and killed some time by drinking $13 raw juice smoothies (only in New York!). When we got back, the store was open, and packed with people.
My first thought was that it looked EXACTLY like the TV show. I know this seems obvious, but I once visited the pawn shop featured on History Channel’s Pawn Stars, and it looked completely different in person. Mostly everything in Obscura has been featured on the show, or is visible while watching the show.
The store is really cool. It is full of so many things. The first item that really caught my eye was this taxidermy pig. It looked less like real taxidermy and more like an adorable Steiff collectible.
Ok so actually, in this picture, he looks terrifying. Trust me that in person he was cute. Anyway, at this point, I introduced myself to Ryan Matthew and asked about the pig. He told me that it was a Victorian specimen and not for sale. If it was for sale, it would be about $5,000.
Ryan also told me that he confuses “Dig This Treasure” with the phrase “Take This Bottle”, which is a “phrase” I have actually never heard of. I am thinking this is some sort of word association thing having to do with messages in a bottle/pirates/buried treasure. Who knows. Either that, or Ryan is the Zodiac killer and speaking to me in ciphers.
Zach and I didn’t find anything to buy at Obscura, even though we went there determined to do so. Everything was pretty out of our price range or wouldn’t fit on the plane home. I kind of regret not buying a t-shirt from the store because it had a nice design. Whomp whomp.
-Erin
So here are some photos of the items I packaged up and sent to Ryan Matthew in thanks for his interview last week. I am like 89% sure he will want none of these things. That said, this is the best we could do in terms of “oddities” at the sales we hit in the past couple weeks.
In case you can’t tell, there is a giant piece of coral, some mushrooms on a rock, and some weird caterpillar-like things on pieces of wood. The caterpillars are particularly bizarre because some were made to look like little mice. We’ll call them micerpillars.
-Erin