by His Serene Highness, The Crown Prince of Torquay
Aubergine House Press, Forthcoming Winter 2025
It is a curious and, at first glance, mildly ludicrous thing that a future sovereign should devote himself not to the grand mechanisms of diplomacy, finance, or ceremonial obligation—but to the detailed and deeply personal cartography of museum gift shops. Yet with Gift Shops I Have Visited, His Serene Highness, the Crown Prince of Torquay, offers us a volume of refinement, elegant melancholia, and surprisingly acute cultural criticism.
As heirs to microstates often are, the Crown Prince is an anachronism usually wrapped in linen. Educated at an unnamed college “north of Trieste,” he is known to have studied Comparative Museology, Trans-Adriatic Semiotics, and what he once enigmatically referred to as “the ethics of knick-knackery.” He neither tweets nor drives. He writes with a Pelikan fountain pen in notebooks made of pressed mulberry leaves. And he shops—with discernment and devotion.
This book—part travelogue, part philosophical treatise, part inventory—is the culmination of twenty years of global museum visiting. From the subterranean lacquer box stalls of the National Folk Art Pavilion in Ulaanbaatar to the minimalist alabaster cube that is the Oslo Kinetic Arts Boutique, the Crown Prince has browsed, pondered, and purchased with the gravitas of a minor Hegelian.
Yet this is no idle litany of acquisitions. What elevates Gift Shops I Have Visited beyond the terrain of royal whimsy or collector’s brag is the author’s profound grasp of the gift shop as a site of cultural condensation. He posits, not unreasonably, that the gift shop may be “the truest mirror of an institution’s unconscious.” If the gallery is what a museum thinks it wants to say, the gift shop is what it cannot help revealing.
Throughout the book, he is both wry and reverent. On the papier-mâché earrings of a feminist folk art co-op in Kraków: “They jangled like indignation, delightfully unarchived.” On the “non-site-specific” bookmarks from the Louvre Abu Dhabi: “Objects that both belong nowhere and insist on being remembered.” On the relentless ubiquity of Monet-themed umbrellas: “It rains, therefore I am impressionable.”
What begins as an ostensibly minor concern—the quality and character of museum gift shops—unfolds into a meditation on memory, longing, and the commodified sublime. The Crown Prince navigates these spaces not as a shopper, but as a seeker. And what he seeks is nothing less than evidence that beauty can survive translation into trinket.
To read this book is to accompany a philosopher-flâneur as he wanders the thresholds of the world’s great institutions—never entirely inside, never entirely outside—purchasing, annotating, and gently satirizing the souvenirs we mistake for meaning.
Let us be clear: Gift Shops I Have Visited is not a catalogue. It is a confession. A love letter. And, if we’re honest, a mirror.
— Mariana Clovier,
Senior Curator of Ephemera, Musée Imaginaire des Objets Transitoires, Paris
