The local ABC television affiliate, WHTM, was downstairs in our new reading room on Tuesday morning filming. They taped interviews with the lieutenant governor, with our deputy secretary of the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, with the project architect, and with the head of conservation at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (who are working on our “Assembly Collection” under a ‘Save America’s Treasures‘ grant).
My part was to select and display some of our treasures so that they could talk about the grand preservation project that our construction embodies.
The video clip was broadcast on the evening of 30 January and is available at the WHTM web site. In it you’ll see the people I just mentioned, along with the new reading room. (Yes, the stained glass and the black cherry paneling makes up my ‘office,’ too.) What a wonderful place to work (once the move is accomplished)!
Books you’ll see: the “Assembly Bible” (a 1739 ‘King James Version’ from London upon which Pennsylvania’s legislators take their oath of office); a volume of Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology; our 1493 German translation of Liber chronicarum (a.k.a. the Nuremberg Chronicle); and — the opening shot — the 19 October 1975 Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper in which Ben Franklin published an account of his ‘kite and key’ experiment (the trick to not getting electrocuted is to stand in a doorway during the lightning storm). We had other gems out on the granite reading room table, but they aren’t highlighted in the film.
Erudite and Eccentric 