Steven Lubar. Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present. viii + 408 pp., illus., notes, index. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2017. $35 (cloth). ISBN 9780674971042. “Look inside: there’s much to learn from the lost museum.” The closing words of Steven Lubar’s new volume reiterate the argument that permeates this latest addition to the literature on museums and the production of knowledge. Through an account of the short-lived Jenks Museum of Natural History and An- thropology at Brown University, and of a 2014 art installation on the site once occupied by it, Lubar, both a museum practitioner and a theorist, considers the fundamental nature of museums and offers solutions for engaging audiences now and in the future. To paraphrase the author, the book begins with history, leading to reflection and thence to revelation. Inside the Lost Museum tells how the Jenks Museum was founded by John Whipple Potter Jenks in 1871 as a university teaching resource and curated by him until his death in 1894. Jenks expanded the collection through expeditions, exchanges, and donations from alumni, and at its peak in the 1890s there were over fifty thousand natural history specimens and anthropological artifacts. Jenks was an advocate of natural theology, and his displays were anachronistic even in his own lifetime. Thereafter a lack of fund- ing led to the decline of the museum and its eventual closing in 1915. Inside the Lost Museum is structured around the themes of collecting, preservation, display, and utility, each section taking the Jenks Museum as its point of departure, proceeding to broader museum history by drawing on a wealth of cases, and concluding with instances of good practice in the present. A coda cen- ters on the Jenks Society for Lost Museums—an art project executed a hundred years after the closing of Jenks’s museum and conceived of by the artist Mark Dion to reimagine the museum in its original build- ing—to argue for artistic intervention as a means of opening up museums to new understandings. The idea of art as a route to reinventing the museum is not original, but Lubar’s strength lies in the number and range of examples he provides. From a methodological perspective, the particular benefit of studying lost muse- ums is, he suggests, one of avoiding the museum success story approach and its contingent risk of teleolog- ical history. In short, the argument goes, there is often more to be learned from museum failures than from successes. The book is a synthesis of three museological genres: the history of the lost or defunct museum, the museum studies reader, and the curatorial handbook. The first of these owes much to the publication of Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor’s landmark title, The Origins of Museums (Clarendon, 1985). This rather reflexive approach to bygone museums, with the emphasis on what academics and museum prac- titioners can learn from such accounts, has driven the continued expansion and diversification of the cat- egory into the twenty-first century. Here, Bernard Lightman deserves special mention for his contribution to increasing knowledge of the myriad sites that once existed for the popular consumption of science in Britain and the United States. The categories of museum studies reader and curatorial manual have sim- ilarly expanded and evolved since the new museology of the 1990s, with a momentum that owes much to the greater availability of visitor response data and of well-documented case studies and to the growing popularity of museum studies in university curricula. The hybrid nature of Inside the Lost Museum, there- fore, opens up its relevance to a range of audiences, in particular museum historians and theorists, mu- seum studies teachers and students, and museum practitioners. This hybridity is unquestionably one of the work’s strengths, offering multiple points of access to mul- tiple reader constituencies. So too is the breadth of museums that Lubar assiduously takes into consider- ation—including museums of anthropology, art, history, natural history, science, and technology—to dem- onstrate that while practices differ between sectors, principles hold good throughout: museums must adapt to survive. But perhaps the book’s greatest strength is the writer’s obvious affection for the Jenks Museum itself. Lubar offers a model for “loving, critical analysis” (p. 332) that is as constructive as it is refreshing. At the same time, however, it is regrettable that the number of permitted images (twenty-one) is insufficient to illustrate his argument fully, a clear source of frustration for the reader but evidently also for the author, 616 Book Reviews: General