Waldesovo muzeum, Button museum in Vršovice, Prague, Czech Republic.
Waldesovo muzeum was a museum in Vršovice, Prague, that focused on small metal and organic objects like buttons, clasps, and fasteners. The collection spanned more than 3000 years and included items ranging from prehistoric times to recent centuries.
Jindřich Waldes founded the museum in 1916 in a hall of his Vršovice factory. After the collection grew, it moved to a rebuilt house at Svatopluk Čech Square, opening there on 25 September 1918. The collections were confiscated in 1939 and later transferred to the Museum of Glass and Jewellery in Jablonec nad Nisou.
The museum's name recalls Jindřich Waldes, the button and fastener manufacturer who founded it. Its director was Paula Wahleová, a Prague art historian of Jewish origin, and the art historian Ješek Hofmann served as curator and edited the museum magazine. A 1933 Indian exhibition borrowed objects from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The former museum building stands at Moskevská 57/262, entered from Slovinská 1/262, near the Moskevská tram stop; Želivského metro station is about a ten-minute walk away. It now houses Gallery DESET, opened in 2003, and an antiquarian bookshop operating since 2020.
Among the curiosities in the collection were Leonardo da Vinci's designs for needle-making machines, kept alongside the fasteners themselves. The museum also held a library of period materials and albums of graphic designs for clasps in its study room.
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