Jay Walker, who is both an entrepreneur and inventor, has also created a library devoted, as he says, “to the astonishing capabilities of the human imagination.”
The exhibits in Walkers library, “go back, roughly, to the point our species learned to write, with a slight post-moveable type bias.” It space is filled with illustrated books and artifacts (Enigma machine; velociraptor skeleton), and the library itself has been called a “marvel.”
Steven Levey of WIRED said, “Walker shuns the sort of bibliomania that covets first editions for their own sake … What gets him excited are things that changed the way people think.”
And According to Walker, ““All of imagination — everything that we think, we feel, we sense — comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.”
In 2008 Walker shared a number of his artifacts with TEDTalks, the video is a mixture of show-and-tell of some of his favorite pieces, and an explanation of what his Library of Human Imagination is all about.
We hope you enjoy!