Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

I’m something of a pack rat. Not the worst of accumulators, mind, because I do bag and bid bye-bye to bunches of stuff when some implicit limit is reached. And part of me, contrariwise, is a minimalist, who wouldn’t mind if all the world were by Bauhaus out of ItalInteriors. So I’m fascinated by Jay Walker’s library, because it might be me, so to speak, if I’d saved my pennies and invested in better stocks than was in fact the case.

Who’s Jay Walker, I hear you ask. He’s a geek entrepreneur who founded Priceline.com and Walker Digital, and who, at one point, was worth $4,000,000,000 — which is way more than I make in a whole week. He also happens to be an inveterate collector, focusing on books and objects of particular historical value. Now when his accumulation grew too large, he didn’t bag-and-toss it. No, he built a library to house it properly.

This giant Wunderkammer is the subject of an article in Wired Magazine, which treats us to half a dozen great big photos of, well, of what some library afficianados might want for Christmas — on the Big Rock Candy Mountain . Here you’ll find, among many many other things:

• a real Sputnik
• a model of NASA’s X-29 jet
• a napkin on which FDR made WWII plans
• a globe of the moon, signed by 9 astronauts who walked on the moon
• the enigma code machine
• etc.

But, oh, it’s the books, the books. He has a 1535 Coverdale Bible, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, a hand-painted celestial atlas from 1660, and… more. Much more.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on October 10, 2008 (boomark / email).