{"id":1630,"date":"2010-06-13T08:37:16","date_gmt":"2010-06-13T12:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/?p=1630"},"modified":"2020-04-08T06:40:53","modified_gmt":"2020-04-08T10:40:53","slug":"private-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/2010\/06\/13\/private-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"Private Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Had a recent experience that demands documentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My brother graduated from Peabody conservatory this year, racking up the family record for most degrees per year: Two bachelor’s and a Masters in five years of study – guitar performance (Peabody), recording engineering (Hopkins), and acoustics (masters from Hopkins) – in case you’re keeping track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In town for the festivities, I insisted that he get us into the Peabody library – a gorgeous architectural relic from the 1880’s, with cast iron tiers of old-school grandeur housing more than a century’s worth of eccentric and excellent collections of generations of librarians. He’d been telling me how awesome it is for the last five years. On this last opportunity I called his bluff, while his student ID was still valid. One fine afternoon, we wandered in and around the main level for a bit. Finally, on something of a whim, he and I walked into the office of the librarian and asked (somewhat cheekily): “We’ve heard you have awesome stuff in the private collection. Can we have a tour?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The librarian was an absolute geek – which I mean in the most complementary possible way. The man loves his books, loves details, knows his stuff, and has a great job. He paused, looked at us, and said “sure, give me a sec to wrap up here.” In short order, he emerged from his office with a key and ushered us upstairs past a series of locked gates. Into the back room we went, which was a mind-bendingly classic room with 20 foot ceilings piled high with antiquities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a central table, where the librarian went straight to a cloth wrapped bundle. “You want to see the oldest items in the collection. These are cuneiform tablets from approximately 2,200 BC.” He semi-casually laid these priceless artifacts out on the table and explained how they were basically receipts. Unbaked clay documenting temple gifts. In a very early sort of RSA coding, they would be baked into a clay box. In the event of controversy, one could break the box and read the (demonstrably) un-molested data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He looked at us, warming to the task and our obvious enthusiasm. “You guys like science? How about a first edition Copernicus?” There, on the table in front of me, he opened up one of the books where Copernicus documented his observations of the elliptical orbits of the planets. A first edition Origin of the Species? No problem. My dad got to hold it for pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I touched a piece of paper printed on Gutenberg’s press. I caressed calfskin vellum documenting nobility in pre-renaissance Italy. I ogled a French Enlightenment encyclopedia – whose frontispiece showed a group of men forcibly unveiling a rather delicate and feminine depiction of Truth, while stripping a crown from Faith to adorn Truth’s head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After perhaps an hour, the Librarian glanced at his watch and with a somewhat staged “goodness, look at the time” ushered us back out and resumed his duties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All I can say is: “Hell yes,” and “some days, it rocks to be me.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Had a recent experience that demands documentation. My brother graduated from Peabody conservatory this year, racking up the family record for most degrees per year: Two bachelor’s and a Masters in five years of study – guitar performance (Peabody), recording engineering (Hopkins), and acoustics (masters…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-life","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1631,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630\/revisions\/1631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}