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.

Spirits under Glass: The Zymo 127 Project


Judith Hoffman makes artist books and pinhole cameras (among other creative endeavors). For the Zymo 127 project she constructed a special camera to dive into the dioramas and capture their inner essence.

Sketches - Members of Sketchcrawl Silicon Valley came by on March 17, 2012.


Heng Hua Wang	Conni Rizzuto	Pierre Uszynski	Pierre Uszynski

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

More photographs by Judith Hoffman


Matchbox pinhole camera with color film	Digital camera	Vintage camera with B/W film	Through-the-viewfinder with vintage camera
Even before the the Zymo 127 project, our beloved artist-in-residence had found the museum to be fertile subject for various alternative photography techniques. The complete set may be seen here

More photography by museum visitors


Neil Kelley	Neil Kelley	Mike Jennings	Arlette

Kathryn Gritt	Kathryn Gritt	Mike Jennings	Bethany Herron

Museum policy encourages photography of the museum and its holdings for scholarly research, simple amusement, or any other purpose. A full set of galleries may be seen here

Diorama videos by Kathryn Gritt, Obscura Day 2010

Selected quotes and Web log entries about the museum

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
A satisfied customer: 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]

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