Wired has an amazing article up about what is possibly the greatest geek library of all time. The library was created by Jay Walker. He's the guy who owns the company that created Priceline.com.
Basically, this is what happens when you give an uber geek an unlimited amount of money. Usually, I can't stand to read or watch video of the enormously wealthy as they take you through their homes MTV Cribs style and explain how all of their money has bought them tons of wasteful crap like a gold plated Mercedes Benz or shit like that. But this collection of items is something else entirely.
Mr. Walker decided to use his vast amounts of cash to put together the most ecclectic and brilliant collection of geeky things ever. And the result is something I could spend weeks in marveling over.
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.
The man has a Nazi Enigma machine, an Apple II motherboard signed by Woz, a globe of the moon signed by almost all of the astronauts who have walked upon it...and for god's sake, he's even got an original Sputnik!!!
This man is a new hero of mine. If I had the cash to make something like this, I could only hope to make something half as cool as what is in this library.
The article has a bunch more pictures of the library and its contents. It's something every geek should check out and drool over.
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