The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

“Can’t you hear him?” she asked. “He’s crying for his father.”

“Please, Charlotte, you must—” began the taxidermist, but then he paused. He could hear a low, thready sound, like weeping.

Closer and closer he came, until he was sure the sound came from the body in her hands.

“We will save him,” Charlotte said.

They made this piece together, imbedding a speaker in the little bear’s chest to amplify the sound and giving him Rose’s diamond earrings in place of eyes. This, the first of many marvelous and wonderful creations by Charlotte Wells. Each one, it is said, came nearly alive under her touch. Nearly.

But does it still cry? I’m sure that’s what you’re wondering. Come closer, lean in. The little bear has something different to tell each one of you.

Lottery ticket numbers.

Messages from lost lovers.

Predictions for the future.

Oh, you want to know what I heard when I leaned near the speaker? Only this—that whomsoever is the next buyer will have luck and fortune for the rest of his days!

Think of the story.

I believe it’s time for the bidding to begin.

A Short History of

Dunkelblau’s Meistergarten

By Tad Williams

One of the more unusual education devices ever designed was the Meistergarten of Ernst Dunkelblau, the “Pedagogue of Linz.” When it was first presented to the public in 1905, it was called “The Eighth Wonder of the World” by some newspapers of the day, “The Devil’s Carousel” by others. All agreed, however, that its like had never been seen before.

“It resembles a Lazy Susan,” commented a reporter for America’s New York World, “but instead of spinning to present dishes to be served, its revolutionary motion is meant to deliver children to Scholarship.”

The Inventor: Ernst A. Dunkelblau

Little can be understood of either the Meistergarten or its products without first examining the life of its creator, Ernst Adelbert Dunkelblau.

Dunkelblau was born in a suburb of Linz, Austria, in 1859. His father was one of the engineers who designed and built the first iron bridge over the Danube, but his mother, Heilwig, had even bigger plans for her only child, and from a very early age little Ernst was given the benefit of her fascination with childhood learning. The acknowledged star of European education at the time was Friedrich Fröbel, famous for his ideas of the kindergarten—a place where children would learn through play. Frau Dunkelblau, however, was a stern woman who felt that the currently fashionable dogma was totally reversed—that children should learn by suffering, not play. She developed her own method, which she called “Arbeit und Verletzung,” or “Work and Injury,” and employed it along with a very ambitious curriculum for her infant son, which she had determined would prepare him to enter a good Austrian university by the time he was twelve years old. In fact, Ernst Dunkelblau was accepted to the Karl-Franzens-Universität, better known today as the University of Graz, at the prodigious age of ten.

Young Dunkelblau never graduated from the university, however. Rumors of the day linked him to a scandal with a much older woman, the wife of a university custodian, who claimed that young Dunkelblau offered her a florin to “nap upon her bosom.” Accounts subsequent to his death suggest that Dunkelblau never entirely overcame this troubling propensity for offering money to women not of his own family; in later years the significance of this weakness became so divisive among European Freudians that there were violent differences of opinion about it—indeed, there are reports of a famous fight in a London café between Otto Rank and Melanie Klein, in which Klein was said to have slapped Rank so hard and so often that he was led away weeping and for weeks would only see patients with a scarf draped over his face.

Much of Ernst Dunkelblau’s personal history between the years of 1871 and 1899 is hazy, little more than rumor and innuendo. It is known that he served briefly in the Austro-Hungarian army as a telegrapher, but was discharged because so many of his messages contained interpolated phrases such as “Ernst is scared,” “sleepy dumplings,” or simply the word “Mutti” (“Mommy”) typed over and over, none of which bore any relationship to the military messages young Dunkelblau had been tasked with sending.

Apparently, he also found time during these years to finish his education, graduating from a small university in Triesen, Liechtenstein, called the Todkrank-Igil Institute. Little more is known, because the university was subsequently burned to the ground by local villagers and its records lost.

Many of Dunkelblau’s later experiments in pedagogy, including the famous Meistergarten, seem to have roots in his Liechtenstein student period, because his adult writings on the subject of educational psychology frequently contain phrases, such as “two-schilling Vaduz Mustache” and “bloody Triesen pitchforks ouch ouch,” which seem to trace to this time.