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V11 2008 INDEX
E-SYLUM ARCHIVE
THE LIBRARY TO END ALL LIBRARIES
It's not numismatic, but it is a library. And what a
library! The "Nerd Library to End All Libraries" is featured in the
October issue of Wired magazine. Now this is my idea of
bibliophile heaven. It's also nice to know that money isn't always wasted
on the wrong people. Who needs yachts and seven homes when you can have
the world's coolest library? -Editor
Nothing quite prepares you for
the culture shock of Jay Walker's library. You exit the austere parlor of
his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic
equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing
historical objects.on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor.the room
occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. 
Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer ... is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you.a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy.
Wearing a huge can-you-believe-it grin is the collection's impresario, the 52-year-old Internet entrepreneur and founder of Walker Digital . a think tank churning out ideas and patents, it's best-known for its lucrative Priceline.com. "I started an R&D lab and have been an entrepreneur. So I have a big affinity for the human imagination," he says. "About a dozen years ago, my collection got so big that I said, 'It's time to build a room, a library, that would be about human imagination.'"
Walker's house was constructed specifically to accommodate his massive library.
Walker shuns the sort of bibliomania that covets first editions for their own sake.many of the volumes that decorate the library's walls are leather-bound Franklin Press reprints. What gets him excited are things that changed the way people think, like Robert Hooke's Micrographia. Published in 1665, it was the first book to contain illustrations made possible by the microscope. He's also drawn to objects that embody a revelatory (or just plain weird) train of thought. "I get offered things that collectors don't," he says. "Nobody else would want a book on dwarfs, with pages beautifully hand-painted in silver and gold, but for me that makes perfect sense."
What can one say, but WOW! -Editor
Wayne Homren, Editor
The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.
To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com
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