Owning a curiosity shop was the best of both worlds. Remarkably, the shop stayed in the family through the decades. Although the shop, which is named after the store in Charles Dickens' story, moved more than a half-dozen times, it never strayed far from Seattle's waterfront. Guess it goes to show you that curiosity is innate to us all. One woman, Shelly Stovall, wrote a letter to the store this year.
Mummies are a hot draw.
But the shop also is remarkable in the Northwest because of its far-reaching historical and cultural contributions, according to Kate Duncan, an associate professor of art history at Arizona State University in Tempe. During her research, she was pleasantly surprised to learn that items from Standley's shop shelves had ended up in museum collections elsewhere. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto bought several items from the shop, including a Haida stone totem pole and a mammoth tusk engraved with scenes of Eskimo life from an Arctic village. D.C. The Newark Museum in New Jersey features a collection from the shop, including tools and baskets woven by the Tlingit, an Alaskan tribe. As part of her research, Duncan also found that the early fathers of Palmer College of Chiropractic, an academic center in Davenport, Iowa, sought out the shop's items.