Birmingham Oddities: A shop that lives up to its name

There are phrases I never expect to hear in interviews. “Human bones are a little easier to come by than you might think,” is certainly one of them.

But when you’re talking to the owner of a shop called Birmingham Oddities, it’s probably best to check your expectations at the door.

Owner Adam Williams, whose full-time job is in making prosthetic limbs and bracing, has run his shop of the curious, macabre and grotesque on Saturdays for about a year and a half. He said many of his shoppers are surprised to find out just how many other people share their niche interests.

“Everybody comes in, and they were like, ‘Oh, I collect this stuff, too. It’s so weird. I didn’t think anybody else liked this,’” Williams said. “And I hear that out of everyone’s mouth. So it’s funny — most people think they’re the odd one, but they really just end up like-minded to so many other people.”

Williams’ start in the oddities business came from his own artwork using bones and hardware to make sculptures. One of his projects in the store was the left half of a human skull suspended in a wooden gyroscopic mount so it can be viewed from any angle. With his medical education, Williams had the advantage of not only a keen interest in the human body but also knowledge of how to obtain skeletal remains for his own purposes.

“I didn’t really start out as an oddities collector. I started out as a scientist and then when I found what I did, that curiosity inside me branched out to so many different things,” he said.

Despite popular belief, there are actually few laws governing sale of human skeletons and even body parts. Between medical schools, private collectors and even eBay — up until a few months ago, when the site changed its policy — Williams said skeletons are a fairly accessible artistic medium. Thus came the quote that stood out to me most in our conversation.

Birmingham Oddities started as a studio space for Williams and a friend. They decided to turn it into an oddities gallery, as they were both collectors themselves and knew several artists with similar interests. It became an instant hit.

“It came about because everybody is weird, and when I put a store out there for them, they bum-rushed it,” Williams said. 

Despite Birmingham’s vibrant food scene, Williams said he doesn’t think many Birmingham residents have begun thinking of downtown as a place to spend time and money outside of mealtime. 

“Birmingham is very creative and very full and rich of great-minded people, but the area just hasn’t supported that,” Williams said. “They haven’t switched their mentality yet.”

While he’s proud his shop is considered something of a weekend destination, Williams would like to see more places to spend time and see his existing small business neighbors succeed as well.

“There’s a local business group of people here, and we all really promote each other and invest in our customers and say, ‘Tell people about this. We can’t survive unless you guys keep coming down here.’ Five dollars or $10 in any one of these stores is enough to keep us running if everybody will just persist in doing that,” he said.

When I visited Williams’ shop, the shelves included skulls (both from humans and other animals), masks, preserved insects, signs, geodes, fossils, artwork, animals preserved in jars and at least three skeletons. And that was just from a quick look around. I could tell Birmingham Oddities is the sort of place you can spend hours and still keep uncovering new items.

Williams finds his oddities through fellow artists, estate sales, auctions, collectors and more. He said he’s yet to find something too weird to put in the store.

He sees himself as responsible for introducing weird and unfamiliar items to Birmingham’s inquisitive minds.

“I have seen so much that anything that compels me will typically compel someone else,” Williams said. “So the majority of the inventory here are things that I find fascinating, in a way.”

Over time, he has learned his customers’ interests, though. Skulls with paint or notes from their past medical uses are always popular, as are the “wet specimens” of animals, though Williams considers them “by far the grossest” items in the store. Other big sellers include insect displays and rat or small animal skulls.

Running Birmingham Oddities means that Williams gets to meet like-minded people in the city each Saturday. He intentionally places some of the more grotesque and surprising items near his sales counter, so he can watch new customers’ faces as they encounter a snake coiled up in a jar of fluid.

“It’s like their body is moving away, but their eyes just keep getting closer,” Williams said. 

Williams frequently hears shoppers say, “You don’t see that every day.” His response: “You do at Birmingham Oddities.”