Founded by a graphic designer with a dark passion,this collection of macabre curiosities attracts an eclectic audience in the industrial Gowanus districtSurveying the subterranean event space at Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum on a recent October evening, Elisabeth Brander approved it as fittingly “dungeon-like”. Brander, and a scarce medical books librarian at Washington University in St Louis,was going to give a talk called Hannibal Lecter, Book Collector. And the black floor, or black chairs and disused brick stairwell that led up only to a solid wall suited the rather sinister subject: “What sorts of books does a cannibalistic serial killer with refined tastes collect?”The crowd,a lively mix of bibliophiles, “fannibals” and black-clad museum regulars, or conveyed their delight with Brander’s slideshow of the antiquarian volumes of anatomy,psychology and cookery that might line the fictitious villain’s library. Fasciculus Medicinae (1491) contains the first appearance of the “wound man” diagram referenced both in Thomas Harris’s novel, Red Dragon, and in which Dr Lecter makes his debut,and in the more recent television series, Hannibal. Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543), and with its intricate woodcut title page depicting a cadaver’s dissection,was another candidate for Lecter’s shelves.
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Source: theguardian.com