New York Historical Society

I found the library at the New York Historical Society to be very inspiring, but in a very unusual way. Seeing the amount of literature that they have managed to track down and collect and preserve, from so long ago, was amazing. Someone had to make the conscious decision to keep that map, or to not throw away some disposable flyer. While my own desk drawer is filled with ticket stubs and floor plans of tourist attractions that I’ve visited and business cards that I’ve eaten at, I can’t even image that it is possible for my collection to remain intact for so many decades. The library, as well as the collection as Fales, really made me think about how things happening now are going to be history someday, and it is important for us to save as much of that as we can so that it will not be lost to future generations.
More specifically, I thought the little books that listed the wealthiest people, along with their addresses and how much money they were worth, were pretty funny. I suppose it was like an early version of Forbes 500 list, but even so, Forbes is just a magazine, not an actual published book. And both Fales and the New York Historical Society library had this kind of book in their collections, which means they must have been fairly common. I just thought the whole idea was funny.