Morgan Library & Museum
There is no shortage of museums to visit in this town, as you might imagine, you could visit one a week for many, many weeks, if that were your thing. It’s kinda my thing, but I was surprised this week that Steve brought up the Morgan Library & Museum as a place to visit. I’m not sure how he found it, but I know we had walked by it a few times and it looked like a place to visit.
So, off we went Saturday to check the place out — turns out it’s not very large but it is jam-packed! I was surprised at the open spaces compared to the volume of space dedicated to galleries. Much more of the former. We started at the cafe, because we had come right at lunchtime (and what better way to determine the quality of a museum than trying the food ;-) and it’s the first thing you see when you walk in. The food was good!
J Pierpont Morgan was a financier in New York City and started what is still around and known today as JP Morgan (although it also merged with Chase so it’s now really JP Morgan Chase). His son, J Pierpont Morgan Jr, continued his legacy and started this museum. It holds a much larger collection than what you can see there, especially in terms of books.
We headed to the photo gallery — a wonderful collection of different photo styles which was quite enjoyable, albeit a bit small and limited.
Next we headed to the Gallery of Stanley’s furniture and art and books, a sort of home library on steroids with a few paintings and sculptures thrown in. The books on these shelves were incredible — many first editions of very old books, including Dickens, Shakespeare and even Bob Dylan’s writings. We headed to another gallery and there was even more (see top photo). Several on display showed just how deep this collection is. The most amazing find, to me, was an original Gutenberg Bible. If you don’t know, Gutenberg was the guy who invented the printing press (at the time referred to as moveable type). He printed several copies of the Bible in Latin in 1455 one of which is seen below.
There were other books from even earlier dates, I saw one dating back to the the eleventh century:
Many of the older manuscripts were illuminated, a process of adding flourishes of color and design to text.
As someone who loves words, I was sort of in seventh heaven here. Although truth be told, I’d rather go to a bookstore or solve a crossword puzzle to get my word fix. Still this was pretty fun.
