(MONEY Magazine) – I've spent a sizable portion of my adult life thinking I don't like museums. That's because I spent a sizable portion of my childhood getting dragged by my parents to all sorts of fancy-schmancy art museums and being bored to tears. The Met, the Guggenheim, MOMA--what self-respecting 11-year-old is going to be interested in those sorts of places? I didn't have time for Matisse and Van Gogh--I had comic books to read, baseball cards to collect, TV to watch.

Two dozen years later, I'm still not particularly interested in the Met or the Guggenheim, but I've learned that museums don't have to be stuffy, boring places--it just depends on what sort of museum we're talking about. As I've discovered in the course of my travels, America is filled with small, conversational museums that don't have the imperious air of the ones I was taken to as a child. The best book on the subject, Lynne Arany and Archie Hobson's Little Museums, profiles over 1,000 of them, ranging from the historical (the Black History Museum in Richmond) to the frivolous (the Lunchbox Museum in Salem, Ala.) to the mundane (the Shovel Museum in North Easton, Mass.) and the unfathomable (the Barbed Wire Museum in La Crosse, Kans.). Taken as a whole, they provide impressive evidence of our innate national impulse toward cultural documentation.

This isn't so surprising. America's ethnic diversity has given us so many proud heritages to preserve and celebrate that even the most remote rural counties tend to have historical museums. Moreover, America's long tradition of free expression has led to a large number of what might politely be termed passionate eccentrics--collectors, obsessives, fanatics. When these people decide to share their passion with the rest of us, the result is a place like the National Lighter Museum in Guthrie, Okla. or the Cookie Jar Museum in Lemont, Ill. I haven't yet visited either of those institutions, but I've seen plenty of others. Here are some of my favorites, each one founded by a passionate eccentric who chose to go public:

--THE MUSEUM OF BEVERAGE CONTAINERS AND ADVERTISING (1055 Ridgecrest Dr., Millersville, Tenn.; 800-826-4929; www.gono.com /cc/museum.htm; $4 admission). With more than 45,000 cans and bottles, as well as bottle caps, labels and print ads, this spectacular facility is more than just an archive of beverage ephemera--it's also a treasure trove of 20th-century commercial design. Curator Tom Bates began collecting cans from the trash when he was 13, and the archive of soda, beer and juice containers he's amassed in the quarter-century since then is brimming with fascinating trivia. Did you know, for example, that Tab was once available in ginger ale, root beer and black cherry flavors? Or that American breweries used to make camouflage-patterned beer cans for our troops? A dynamite gift shop full of vintage collectibles provides the finishing touch for one of America's best special-interest museums.

--THE MUSEUM OF QUESTIONABLE MEDICAL DEVICES (201 Main St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-379-4046; www.mtn.org/~quack; free). Bob McCoy's engaging assortment of quackery on parade is simultaneously entertaining and thought-provoking. It's easy to laugh at an antique prostate gland warmer or a foot-powered breast-enlargement pump, but it was no laughing matter to the people who trusted these products, just as millions of people continue to put their faith in dubious quick-fix treatments and gadgets today. McCoy, who happily bills himself as "a veritable encyclopedia of the world's most inane and useless information," has one major advantage over his rival curators: Many of the devices in his collection are hands-on, which means you can take them for a test drive right there in the museum. This makes for hilarious photo opportunities, particularly with the vintage weight-loss contraptions.

--THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK (5754 Highway 23, Spring Green, Wis.; 608-935-3639; www.thehouseontherock .com; $15.40). While not small by any means--indeed, it takes a good four hours to tour the sprawling grounds--this national treasure is nonetheless quirky and playful enough to fit the small-museum concept. Loosely speaking, the House on the Rock is the world's biggest collection of the world's biggest collections, among them the world's biggest collection of self-playing instruments, and the world's biggest collection of carousel horses (none of which are on the world's biggest carousel, which is also here). It also has the world's biggest cannon, the world's biggest theater organ console, hundreds of dolls and doll houses, more than 6,000 Santa Claus figurines, a dizzying array of historical exhibits and architectural displays, and a lot more. The sheer volume of material borders on overload, and there's little rhyme or reason to the place, but you definitely get the impression of a singular, if somewhat warped, sensibility at work. That sensibility is the spirit of the late Alex Jordan, a reclusive collector who built this bizarre facility near Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin house to spite Wright, who is said to have once snubbed Jordan's father.

--THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY (9341 Venice Blvd., Culver City, Calif.; 310-836-6131; www.mjt.org; $4). This storefront gallery space, which focuses on charming obscurities running the gamut from science (an exhibit devoted to a particularly odd subspecies of bat) to art (a collection of tiny figurines carved out of grains of rice), is more than just a museum. It's really an ongoing art project that functions as an extended commentary on the nature of museums themselves. Although poker-faced curator David Wilson will never admit it, several of the exhibits at any given moment are hoaxes. Which ones? It's a testament to Wilson's presentation skills that you can never be sure. His unspoken point is that it doesn't matter--if we're willing to suspend our disbelief in the face of the marvels he's showing us, then their veracity is largely irrelevant. This approach, beautiful in its simplicity, strikes at the heart of what museums really are: places where we can expand not just our knowledge but our imaginations.

I suppose that's what my parents were trying to teach me all those years ago. If only they'd known that my imagination would be captured by things like a 1950s Nu-Grape soda bottle and an antique blood magnetizer instead of fine art, perhaps I would have warmed up to museums a bit sooner.

Award-winning travel writer Paul Lukas, a bit of a passionate eccentric himself, is often told that his collection of oddball consumer products and industrial artifacts makes his home look "just like a museum."