They showed us many fabulous old books, which I would remember more about if I had written this eight months ago like I should have. I can tell you that among them was a nifty volume called Yaggy’s Anatomical Study, copyrighted 1885 in Chicago, Illinois (with patents granted in 1886). It came in several sections, for different parts of the body. The largest was a torso, with flaps. First you lift up the muscles,  then the front of the ribcage:

…then the lungs, the heart, and onward until you see the back of the body cavity. Another section had an arm and a leg, with different flaps showing how the blood vessels and bones and muscles are situated. One page shows three views of a stomach; the last is captioned “a stomach, after ten or fifteen days continuous drinking.” It doesn’t look very healthy. Something to do with a temperance campaign, I guess.

Speaking of health campaigns, they also showed us a set of posters printed in 1928 for a Soviet public health campaign, warning women about the dangers of veneral disease. Like this one:

It’s titled “Gonorrhea can Deprive a Woman of the Joy of Motherhood.” See how sad she is? It’s because she has gonorrhea and can’t have children. The set of posters was meant to be taken around to instruct people on public health. They’ve digitized the whole album – you can see it here.

Here’s another one, because it’s always fun to mix ideology and public health:

The caption, according to the online album: “Capitalism generates the causes of prostitution: lack of rights, material want, homelessness.” (The next one, helpfully, says that with socialistic development, “improvement of women’s labor qualifications, involvement of women in political and social affairs, protection of women and children removes the causes of prostitution.”)

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside. Well, it looks like something. It looks like a hopeless victim of the ’60s.

See? Hopeless. But the story’s different when you go inside. The entrance is on the ground level. From the outside, in the picture above, the ground level looks like a cave, but there’s actually quite a nice glass-enclosed lobby there.

From the lobby you go up a wide staircase and you’re in this:

All those white panels you saw on the outside of the building are actually 1.3-inch-thick slabs of marble. The light filters through them and gives the whole space this sort of warm, wood-panelled-library feel. On the right you can see part of the central column of stacks – six floors of rare books behind glass. It’s like a zoo for books.

I don’t think banging on the glass is a good idea – it’s also not a good idea in zoos, they say – but I did take some pictures through it. Look, old books:

The library had a temporary exhibit on the effect of psychoanalysis on American writers and thinkers. They also have a few treasures on permanent display. This is a page from John James Audubon’s Birds of America:

The book is so big it’s called the Double Elephant Folio. Something I didn’t know about Audubon: He was born in Saint Domingue – you may know it better as Haiti – and raised mostly in Nantes. He emigrated at the age of 18, hung out in Pennsylvania for a while, migrated to the frontier, and eventually set out to paint every bird in America. Read about him here.

They also have a Gutenberg bible.

Oh, you Ivy League types, you think you’re so hot, with your…Gutenberg Bibles. Ok, yeah, I can’t really dispute the coolness of owning a Gutenberg Bible.

Gratuitous arty shot of exterior:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The exhibit shows the tradition of natural history that Darwin came from. His theory of natural selection was based on years of careful study of different kinds of animals – he knew more than anyone about barnacles, for example, and of course there were his famous Galápagos finches. Natural history is a darn good way to learn about nature.

Most of the displays were illustrations from books back to the 15th century. Back then, people were sort of conflicted between relying on classical texts – it was the Renaissance, they were really into that stuff – and observing plants and animals in nature.Some of the pictures had clearly been done by people who had never seen the animal in question, and the texts often came from the ancient Greeks. But eventually they started figuring out that they should actually be observing the animals they were writing about. (Whoa! Crazy talk!)

This adorable hedgehog was in a 1551 book, Historia Animalium:

Isn’t it spunky? (The label says “bristling with charm.”)

Here are some copepods from a book published in 1820 in Geneva. Copepods are teeny crustaceans – relatives of crabs and shrimp.

I was excited to see these guys because I saw a lot of copepods in the Bering Sea last spring. I wrote stories about copepods on at least four days, but see this day for some really nice copepod portraits. (My fingers got really, really cold while Chris was taking the pictures of the glow-in-the-dark copepods, so be sure to go appreciate the beauty.)

This Portuguese Man O’ War was collected in the deep sea in the 1820s.

That is one pretty jellyfish.

From a book published around 1860, a gorilla:

The gorilla was only scientifically described in 1847. Doesn’t that seem late? I mean, gorillas are really big! And that scientific description was just based on bones; apparently no Westerner saw a live gorilla until the 1850s. Chimps and orangutans were already pretty well known by then. (You can read a little gorilla history in this 1988 newsletter – it’s the first story.)

The library had a copy of On the Origin of Species on display, but I failed to take a picture of it because, um, it was just words, see. There were no pretty pictures of animals. Oops.

So, instead, I will leave you with a picture of my best Scrabble play ever, that night at my aunt and uncle’s house:

I played “EQUINELY” for 239 points. This was made possible by two factors: (1) my uncle doesn’t play defensively, so he put that Q right up there by that triple word score, and (2) in our rules, you can look up words before you play them. I wouldn’t have taken a chance on “equinely” if this had been a challenge game, but I thought it might be a word, and I checked the scrabble dictionary, and it was. Woo. Hoo.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me, and they aren’t that good, are they? books behind glass. kind of a rough subject.