Traveling Museum, Charlotte B's Bday, Artsy Toast, Coachella Design & More: Endnotes 17 April

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

If you’ve listened to our podcast episode about museums (A Gathering of Muses, A Clutch of Curators), you know that we are fans of cabinets of curiosities — collections of natural wonders, paintings, thingamajigs, and doodads from around the world that inspire delight and curiosity. When I learned about the Office of Collecting & Design (OCD) in the (awesome) art magazine Colassal, I was smitten. The OCD is a collection of beautiful found objects compiled by Jessica Oreck, a world traveler, artist, and filmmaker. She’s outfitted a 42-foot trailer with dark wood cabinets, plush furniture, and inviting nooks to showcase her bounty of unique buttons, Indian ribbons, miniature wooden animals, doll heads, thimbles and beads, marbles, dollhouse miniatures, matchboxes, and more. She’s a fan of the less-than-perfect, as evidenced by her assortment of damaged dice: ‘The pips are uneven, or the corners are broken, or they’re not square on all sides. I like the ones that have lots of imperfections the best. They have history in them.’ The OCD is a please DO touch museum. Oreck wants it to be a sort of playroom for adults. ‘All the drawers are meant to be opened, all the boxes are meant to be lifted.’ To that end, you can book a private scavenger hunt in the OCD, or take a workshop to learn how to recreate the unique flatlay style of photography they use to showcase the museum’s treasures. Learn more on The Office of Collecting & Design website — and check the fall touring schedule to see if it’s coming to your area. If the OCD isn’t coming to you, you can bring a bit of it into your life with fun clubs — postcard club! treasure club! decoder club! — or treat yourself to a little something from The Office of Collecting shop. I’m very taken with this decoder and this itty-bitty, Victorian-style hedgehog. Finally, here’s a Q&A with Jessica in The Art of Play, and two fun video interviews here and here.

• An editor at the Five Books website shares the best mystery books of 2026.

• We had a fantastic discussion this week over on Substack about everyone’s favorite food-centric books.

• Tomorrow is Charlotte Brontë’s birthday — Happy 210th, Char! Just in time, the BBC highlights a ‘raucous’ manuscript from the Jane Eyre author, and this new retelling of the classic novel — set in mid-century Hollywood — sounds really fun.

• Founded in 1653, Chetham’s Library in Manchester, England, is the oldest surviving public library in the English-speaking world. You can only imagine the stories those bookshelves could tell! This is the next best thing: a peek at the lost and found in the library.

• Oh, wow. Take a gander at the Milwaukee Public Library:

• Nine Modernist Houses in the UK and Europe That You Need to Visit. These houses ‘were all designed, built, and decorated in the 20th century, yet they are still incredibly rich with stories, history, and inspiring design. Perhaps you’re in the mood for a small and clever Bauhaus apartment, a midcentury modern designer’s home, or a streamlined Art Deco villa… why not use that as a reason to plan a city break… and discover more of what somewhere such as Paris or Copenhagen has to offer?’

• Toast is one of my favorite foods, and these imaginative slices of toast are edible works of art. ‘While many of us slather our toast with butter day after day, Manami Sasaki is transforming thick slices of bread into Zen Japanese rock gardens and Pantone swatches that make breakfast into the most jubilant meal of the day.’

• Stunning images from the Artemis II photo album.

• Treat yourself to the˙ lovely poem ‘The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner’ by Lorna Goodison:

• So cool! The Center for the Art of Translation is getting a permanent home in San Francisco. ‘The new space will open to the public in 2027, with an aim of creating a physical and cultural infrastructure for literary translators, and the readers who support their work.’

• Enjoy the spectacle without the crowds and desert sand: 10 of the best stage designs from Coachella.

• I had no idea that Claude Monet also drew satirical caricatures. This is quite the lede paragraph: ‘At the age of fifteen, Claude Monet was, by his own account, one of the most successful artists in Le Havre. Crowds would gather in the Norman port city to gawk at the pictures he sold through a framing shop: not paintings of haystacks or of the sea or water lilies, but slightly cruel caricatures of local bigwigs and minor celebrities. He had already learned to commercialize, charging his customers 20 francs (around 200€ in today’s money). If I had continued… I would have been a millionaire.’

• This is so neat! The Czech constitution got a slick new graphic design.

• News you can use: Booklovers’ Guide to Quebec.

Wishing you a hodgepodge of fun and curiosity.

Top image courtesy of Jessica Oreck/The Office of Collecting & Design.