The Penumbral Cabinet · first shadow kept 1911
A private cabinet of collected shadows.
Sixty-one specimens · no objects · shown at dusk
Descend
The keeper’s foreword
Mine began the evening my grandmother’s ladder was taken away for firewood, and its shadow stayed on the stairwell wall — not painted, not scorched, simply reluctant. I pinned it before it could think better of remaining. That was 1911. I have kept shadows ever since.
People ask what a shadow is worth once its object is gone. I tell them it is worth the same as a name once its bearer is gone: entirely useless, and impossible to throw away.
The cabinet holds sixty-one specimens. Six are shown. The rest are resting, or are not yet ready to be looked at, which is not the same thing.
— E. Vane, Keeper of the Cabinet, in the forty-first year of keeping
Specimens I – VI
Take the light. Drag the gaslight across the wall and the specimens will re-cast themselves — lengthening, leaning, softening at the tip. Mind them. They remember being longer.
One light is provided · arrow keys also move it · do not stand between the light and the wall
The catalogue
Entries follow the keeper’s ledger, in the keeper’s order, which is the order of grief and not of value.
1.The pinning of a shadow is painless, or at least has never been complained of.
2.The visitor was compensated with an inch of the cabinet’s own shadow, cut from the quiet end.
3.The black paper is itself under consideration as specimen LXII, on the grounds that it has begun to unfold.
Visiting
Appointments are made by letter. Letters are answered by shorter letters. There is no address; the letters know the way.