ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies two initially complementary functions engaged in by all of the museums: those associated with, respectively, display and data. It examines the origins, functions and significance of the commercial museum during the years of the European fin de siécle. The chapter also examines bureaux of information that evolved into services which were to outgrow and outlast their parent museums. According to the Director of the United States National Museum and the author of The Principles of Museum Administration, George Brown Goode, commercial museums could therefore become centers for the display of 'saleable crude materials and manufactures' and for information about 'markets, means of distribution, prices and the demand and supply of trade'. Utilitarian were, in effect, an early mass medium of consumerism and display designed to gather together 'the commercial travellers of the universal world, side by side with their employers and customers, with a showroom for their goods'.
