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A Journey Back In Time At the Peabody Essex Museum
51 Plays2 years ago
Benjamin Miller continues his odyssey through the PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center, which embraces a sizeable portion of the museum’s nearly 2 million objects sourced from around the globe. Christian Louboutins and a $2.1 million copy of the Declaration of Independence are on the menu, as Ben speaks with Angela Segalla, director of the Collection Center, curators Karina Corrigan and Paula Richter, and Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Peabody Essex Museum
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:14
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:15
Speaker
Last week, we set off on an adventure through the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
00:00:21
Speaker
But instead of the museum galleries on view to the public, we went behind the scenes into the collection center where PEM keeps the vast majority of their actual collection.
00:00:30
Speaker
It's 120,000 square feet with these cavernous ceilings and towering scaffolds and fancy customized cabinets all dedicated to making the collection as safe and accessible as possible.
00:00:41
Speaker
Now pretty much all major museums have some kind of storage along these lines, but this one is brand new, state-of-the-art, and is designed to solve problems that museums run into all the time.
00:00:52
Speaker
And that's all well and good, but we're here for the stories, right?
00:00:56
Speaker
Well, that's what I set out to find in the collection center, and boy did I find them.
Exploring Exotic Objects and Global Connections
00:01:02
Speaker
The museum has historically focused on exotic objects from distant lands, and personally I adore pieces that draw connections across the globe, so the PEM collection is especially exciting for me.
00:01:13
Speaker
I barely even touched the tip of the iceberg, but still I came away with such interesting stories that we decided we had to give them two episodes.
00:01:22
Speaker
And so here's the second part of my adventure in the Peabody Essex Museum Collection Center, complete with a whaling ship's logbook, a pair of Christian Louboutins, what?
00:01:31
Speaker
A $2 million piece of paper?
00:01:34
Speaker
And probably even more that I'm forgetting about right now.
00:01:38
Speaker
Oh yeah, operating heavy machinery and moving giant statues.
00:01:42
Speaker
Yeah, we've got a lot going on today.
00:01:45
Speaker
As always, you can see photos of all the objects we talk about today at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast, which I highly recommend checking out, or on my Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:01:55
Speaker
And make sure that you're subscribed to Curious Objects, which you can do right now to make sure you don't miss future episodes.
00:02:01
Speaker
If you like the show, it would really help me out to leave a five-star review and rating, which helps new listeners to find the podcast.
Fashion Highlights: From Persian Shoes to Louboutins
00:02:09
Speaker
If you want to get in touch, and I hope you will, I love hearing your thoughts and comments and ideas and suggestions, you can email me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
00:02:20
Speaker
With that said, thanks for listening, and let's get to it.
00:02:24
Speaker
Should we start with shoes?
00:02:26
Speaker
Let's start with shoes.
00:02:28
Speaker
Last week, we heard from curator Paolo Richter about an 18th century Persian shoe.
00:02:34
Speaker
How about a 21st century French shoe?
00:02:37
Speaker
Can we even put that in a podcast about antiques?
00:02:41
Speaker
Does France count as a far distant exotic land?
00:02:45
Speaker
Let's see if my editor cuts this part.
00:02:48
Speaker
And then finally, going back to high fashion here, a relatively recent pair of shoes and by a very well-known contemporary designer, Christian Louboutin.
00:03:01
Speaker
Yes, speaking of red heels.
00:03:05
Speaker
And I have to be careful so I don't puncture myself here, but there they are.
00:03:08
Speaker
There's the red soles.
00:03:10
Speaker
Trademarked color.
00:03:12
Speaker
Yes.
00:03:12
Speaker
But these now the tops are black, but the most noticeable feature is these metal studs covering the entire surface.
00:03:22
Speaker
Yes, they're kind of like loafers in a way, but they're high fashion and they have a very kind of aggressive sort of presentation.
00:03:34
Speaker
Prickly.
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:37
Speaker
They came to the museum through a collection associated with a Boston fashion entrepreneur, a woman named Marilyn Reisman.
00:03:49
Speaker
And she owned a boutique called Apogee on Newbury Street in Boston.
00:03:55
Speaker
And it was called Apogee because she tried to carry the most avant-garde fashion in Boston.
00:04:04
Speaker
So whatever...
00:04:07
Speaker
Lord & Taylor and Saks and all the department stores were carrying in Boston.
00:04:11
Speaker
She wanted to be at least a couple of steps ahead in terms of avant-garde fashion.
00:04:17
Speaker
we were able to acquire after she passed away.
00:04:20
Speaker
She did come to events at PEM and I had the opportunity to meet her, which was really wonderful and get to know her a bit.
00:04:28
Speaker
Our library was able to collect some of the records that went along with the collection, but her family donated her wardrobe collection after she passed away in her memory.
00:04:41
Speaker
And
00:04:42
Speaker
her wardrobe evolved a lot over time.
00:04:45
Speaker
So some of the earlier pieces, and it was not even what we ended up acquiring, I think probably represented maybe the last two and a half decades of her life.
00:04:55
Speaker
So there were several additional decades that she lived that they were no longer in her possession.
00:05:03
Speaker
I don't know what happened to her earlier clothes, but
00:05:05
Speaker
So these were while she was still working with her company in Boston.
00:05:09
Speaker
And by the time she was wrapping it up, she had gravitated.
Avant-Garde Fashion and Maritime Roots
00:05:16
Speaker
She started out with kind of classic high-end fashion.
00:05:20
Speaker
So she loved Chanel and a number of other French designers.
00:05:26
Speaker
And then in the 90s, 80s, 90s, into the early 2000s,
00:05:30
Speaker
she gravitated first to avant-garde European designers, so she moved to the Belgian designers.
00:05:37
Speaker
And so we were able to acquire Anne de Mühle Meester, Martin Margiela, some of the other Belgian and avant-garde designers
00:05:46
Speaker
designers from the recent past through her collection.
00:05:51
Speaker
And then she moved to Japanese fashion.
00:05:54
Speaker
And I would see there were not a lot of fashion followers wearing avant-garde.
00:05:59
Speaker
So this would be Yoji Yamamoto, Comme des Garcons, Rei Kawakubo.
00:06:06
Speaker
they really were doing fashion like no one else at the time.
00:06:10
Speaker
And so we were able to acquire these wonderful Japanese pieces.
00:06:14
Speaker
And of course, PEM has a historic Japanese collection that has its own unique story.
00:06:21
Speaker
But we were just really thrilled to be able to feature some of the most avant-garde fashion through the lens of one individual who was...
00:06:33
Speaker
an influencer at the time with what was being sold in Boston and also showing it, her own wardrobe.
00:06:43
Speaker
She's very socially well-connected in Boston.
00:06:48
Speaker
And so these are a pair of her shoes.
00:06:50
Speaker
I love that.
00:06:51
Speaker
And I love the sort of continuing tradition of trans-Pacific exchange, cultural connection.
00:06:59
Speaker
And at PEM, those exchanges and connections go all the way back to their founding in 1799 as a maritime museum, with captains navigating the globe and bringing back the most curious objects they could find.
00:07:11
Speaker
But they weren't on pleasure cruises.
00:07:13
Speaker
By the mid-19th century, New England was the world's leading producer of whale oil.
00:07:18
Speaker
In 1846, there were more than 700 whaling vessels active out of New England ports, and each ship had its logbook.
00:07:26
Speaker
And these weren't necessarily the dry matter-of-fact record books you might be picturing.
00:07:31
Speaker
And what I love about this journal is it's got everything, right?
00:07:35
Speaker
So it's got watercolors of the boat itself on the water.
00:07:40
Speaker
It has on the title page here, it has a list of the crew, which is actually fairly rare in log books.
00:07:47
Speaker
And I know that some of the crew members have been identified as African-American, which is one vein of study of log books that is happening today.
00:07:58
Speaker
It's got lots of little watercolors of the ship on the sea.
00:08:02
Speaker
You've got a little watercolor there of three whale's tails sticking up from the ocean.
00:08:06
Speaker
That's fantastic.
00:08:08
Speaker
There's guys in a rowboat here, presumably rowing out to harpoon a whale.
00:08:16
Speaker
That's Dan Lipkin, director of the Penn Library.
00:08:19
Speaker
He's talking about the logbook of the chase from the years 1839 to 1840.
00:08:23
Speaker
So are these sort of, shall we say, useful illustrations in that they help the reader to understand what's happening?
00:08:32
Speaker
Or are they more sort of doodles and, you know, pastime?
00:08:37
Speaker
Well, I think it's probably a combination.
00:08:40
Speaker
They are...
00:08:41
Speaker
decoration in a way, they're illuminations of this manuscript, if you will.
00:08:45
Speaker
But they also give you a sense of what's going on during the voyage.
00:08:49
Speaker
So here's a whale stamp.
00:08:50
Speaker
This tells you that they've gotten 50 barrels of oil from this particular whale because these stamps are often accompanied by a date and a number of barrels that were boiled down from that whale.
00:09:01
Speaker
You see whaling activity on the bottom here.
00:09:05
Speaker
Here's a whale being harpooned.
00:09:07
Speaker
These ships are actually boiling the blubber down.
00:09:10
Speaker
All right.
00:09:11
Speaker
It's got landscapes, you know, like this, views of towns on the sea.
00:09:17
Speaker
In the back here, we have vessels spoken by the brig chase.
00:09:21
Speaker
So we actually...
00:09:23
Speaker
know when the chase encountered the Triton right out of war in Rhode Island.
00:09:31
Speaker
And we have, we have, we index these occurrences of ships meeting on the open water.
00:09:36
Speaker
So these are boats from Wareham, Massachusetts, Rochester, which is also Massachusetts near New Bedford, New Bedford.
00:09:42
Speaker
So a lot of these are whale ships, the brown, the Emerald from Salem.
00:09:47
Speaker
And that rightmost column.
00:09:49
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:09:51
Speaker
200 barrels.
00:09:52
Speaker
Barrels, right.
00:09:54
Speaker
125 barrels.
00:09:55
Speaker
Is that the cargo of this?
00:09:56
Speaker
This is the cargo of the ship.
00:09:57
Speaker
So they were recording how well these ships were doing on their whaling journeys.
00:10:02
Speaker
Wow.
00:10:03
Speaker
Which is something of interest to others, right?
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:10:07
Speaker
This is a track of how many whales were harpooned or captured by the different boats that were on the voyage.
00:10:14
Speaker
So the three boats, as you can see, S-boat here, was done the best during the voyage, right?
00:10:21
Speaker
Every time they captured a whale, they would mark it down for that particular whale boat.
00:10:27
Speaker
Provisions, signal flags, there's...
00:10:34
Speaker
There's poems here.
00:10:35
Speaker
Poetry.
00:10:36
Speaker
Poetry to Margaret, you know, probably a, you know, heartfelt remembrance of Margaret, the seducer at the grave of his victim, written on board the brig chase, September 18th, 1840.
00:10:51
Speaker
They really were bored.
00:10:53
Speaker
There was some time in between whales.
00:10:57
Speaker
There are sea shanties in here, songs.
00:11:00
Speaker
There's a panel here of several watercolors of the boat.
00:11:04
Speaker
So a gam was when ships met on the open water and essentially had a party.
00:11:10
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:12
Speaker
I had note cards printed with this illustration that I send out if I want to send a thank you.
00:11:17
Speaker
So killing a sperm whale...
00:11:20
Speaker
Our larboard boat stove, so a whale has broken the larboard boat, three boats and a chase.
00:11:27
Speaker
You can see the whales there on the water.
00:11:28
Speaker
It's just really, it's kind of like the perfect logbook, and very few of them are like this, you know.
00:11:35
Speaker
And we don't really collect whaling journals.
00:11:39
Speaker
we kind of leave that to New Bedford and to Mystic.
00:11:43
Speaker
You know, we're more interested in trade and merchant activity.
00:11:47
Speaker
But, you know, something like this is just so charming and really, really wonderful.
00:11:52
Speaker
Justifiable exception.
00:11:54
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:11:55
Speaker
Yeah, so...
00:11:56
Speaker
Plus, you've got this wonderful penmanship and some of these decorated headings of the pages here, the Brick Chase of Rochester in the South Atlantic Ocean, an anchor.
00:12:07
Speaker
So some of these drawings are probably about what's going on on a given day.
00:12:11
Speaker
And like I said, some of them are just decorations.
00:12:14
Speaker
That's a fantastic volume.
00:12:15
Speaker
Yes, I agree.
00:12:16
Speaker
And this is actually digitized and available on our internet archive page.
00:12:23
Speaker
FYI, Dan isn't lying.
00:12:24
Speaker
We'll put a link to look through this book in the show notes and online at the magazine antiques.com slash podcast.
00:12:31
Speaker
Now, we're going to come back to Dan in a bit, but he and I were talking and turning pages inside the Phillips Library, which is actually its own little world inside the collection center.
00:12:42
Speaker
And it's the first part of the whole building to be more or less fully complete with everything moved in and all the equipment set up.
00:12:50
Speaker
The rest of the building, well, it's chock full of objects, but it's still a work in progress.
00:12:55
Speaker
And I don't know about you, but I love a good work in progress.
00:13:00
Speaker
So I asked Angela Segala, you remember her from last week.
00:13:04
Speaker
She is the director of the collection center.
00:13:06
Speaker
I asked Angela, how many objects are in this room?
00:13:09
Speaker
Well, there's about 50,000.
00:13:14
Speaker
With the photography, oh gosh, with photography, I would say closer to about 75,000 objects in here.
00:13:23
Speaker
And what fraction of Penn's collection does that represent?
00:13:27
Speaker
A small one.
00:13:28
Speaker
So our collection, really amazing and vast.
00:13:32
Speaker
It is not encyclopedic.
00:13:33
Speaker
However, a lot of our smaller decorative arts pieces are still in Salem.
00:13:39
Speaker
We believe the collection numbers about 800,000 pieces.
00:13:44
Speaker
So it is a small amount.
00:13:48
Speaker
But we, like I said, we have plans.
00:13:49
Speaker
We've been working with our architect for over 10 years.
00:13:54
Speaker
And we're about to start putting these plans in action.
00:13:57
Speaker
So very soon we'll be moving those things here.
00:14:01
Speaker
Our intent is to put almost everything in this building, with the exception of some of the architectural pieces, the historic houses, buildings,
00:14:12
Speaker
do have some things housed in them that are storage material.
00:14:17
Speaker
And that doesn't mean that they're subpar.
00:14:19
Speaker
It means that that's the space we had.
00:14:21
Speaker
In fact, nothing is...
00:14:24
Speaker
in a particular location based on its quality.
00:14:27
Speaker
It's always where it is because of space.
00:14:31
Speaker
Sure.
00:14:32
Speaker
Let's just walk all the way up this next aisle so that you can see some of the photography boxes.
00:14:40
Speaker
So these were once located in the basement of East India Marine Hall.
00:14:45
Speaker
um which is the oldest part of phalem and they were in the basement it was a very small stairwell going
Moving the Museum: Challenges and Strategies
00:14:54
Speaker
into the basement so when we had to move that collection in preparation for the wing construction we cut a hole in the floor and lifted everything up
00:15:08
Speaker
including the cabinets that I'll show you next door.
00:15:11
Speaker
So about 60 plus thousand objects were lifted via a gantry from the basement up to the main floor.
00:15:20
Speaker
And we've moved the entire archaeology collection three times now.
00:15:24
Speaker
Really?
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:26
Speaker
Boy, you've had your work cut out for you.
00:15:29
Speaker
But it's always fun.
00:15:31
Speaker
You always learn something.
00:15:33
Speaker
You always get a new view of the institution.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's just invigorating.
00:15:38
Speaker
It really is.
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:43
Speaker
So to ask a potentially uncomfortable question, what have been your scariest moments in the process of moving these objects around?
00:15:57
Speaker
Well, let's see.
00:16:00
Speaker
I think that some of the scarier moments are the things that are heavy and large.
00:16:06
Speaker
And I spend a lot of time preparing.
00:16:11
Speaker
I spend a lot of time preparing with very knowledgeable people.
00:16:18
Speaker
So by the time we start moving those pieces, we have a plan.
00:16:23
Speaker
So my fear gets managed, I should say.
00:16:29
Speaker
think it's always good to have a little bit of fear because if you don't, that means that you've lost sight of, or at least speaking for myself, I lose sight of the importance of what I'm doing if I'm not a little bit nervous.
00:16:45
Speaker
And I think that, gosh, we moved a large piece of sculpture into
00:16:53
Speaker
Madea, marble.
00:16:55
Speaker
The crate is over there and you cannot see her.
00:16:59
Speaker
But she was several thousand pounds and taking her out of the former Plummer Daylin building or the current Plummer Daylin building, former site of the library in Salem was quite scary.
00:17:14
Speaker
I was worried not necessarily about the object because it was packed very well, but because I was worried for the people moving it.
00:17:23
Speaker
But we put so much thought into the planning of these things that the risk is as minimal as it can possibly be.
00:17:32
Speaker
So, you know.
00:17:34
Speaker
all the strapping is tested, the, you know, use appropriate equipment.
00:17:40
Speaker
It's when you do things quickly and without thinking it through that, you know,
00:17:45
Speaker
things can happen.
00:17:47
Speaker
And luckily when it comes to those bigger pieces, we do take our time.
00:17:53
Speaker
Now that doesn't mean that the moving projects had a lot of time associated with them.
Shoe Industry History and Its Complex Ties
00:17:58
Speaker
We had to snap to it and we packed 30,000 objects in a year and a half.
00:18:05
Speaker
We had a
00:18:07
Speaker
staff of eight people on our side and then we also hired an art packing company to help us.
00:18:16
Speaker
So we had about eight people helping.
00:18:18
Speaker
So it was quite an enterprise.
00:18:19
Speaker
Gosh, I mean, that's 100 objects a day.
00:18:22
Speaker
It's a lot for eight people to go through.
00:18:24
Speaker
It is.
00:18:25
Speaker
They were very good at it and we just kept our eye on the ball.
00:18:35
Speaker
Should we do some more shoes?
00:18:39
Speaker
Let's do some more shoes.
00:18:41
Speaker
But this time, let's make them old.
00:18:43
Speaker
Shoemaking was a huge industry here on the North Shore of Massachusetts and throughout Massachusetts.
00:18:50
Speaker
Like the textile industry in the 19th century, well before the Civil War, decades, there were early manufacturers who were on the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution in this area.
00:19:06
Speaker
I think
00:19:07
Speaker
people know more about the textile industry that was here, but the shoe industry was also here.
00:19:14
Speaker
And it does continue on in New England to today, actually.
00:19:19
Speaker
So there were 17th century settlers who were shoemakers or cord wainers, as they might have called them in the 17th and into the 18th century.
00:19:28
Speaker
But then these factories started, particularly in Lynn, Massachusetts, or in Haverhill, which is up along the Merrimack River Valley.
00:19:38
Speaker
And they grew exponentially.
00:19:42
Speaker
It was a leading shoemaking area in the country, which is kind of an almost forgotten chapter of American history.
00:19:51
Speaker
So we're looking now, this is a colossal, colossal shoe.
00:19:55
Speaker
It's also not, I would say, decorative.
00:19:58
Speaker
It's incredibly plain.
00:20:00
Speaker
It looks very practical, workaday, brown, almost black leather.
00:20:07
Speaker
And again, it might have been Paul Bunyan's shoe.
00:20:12
Speaker
It's...
00:20:13
Speaker
It's this must be a size 14.
00:20:18
Speaker
Well, this is this is this relates directly to shoe manufacturing in the local area again.
00:20:26
Speaker
And this shoe was part of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation collection.
00:20:31
Speaker
And they kept their own records.
00:20:33
Speaker
So they recorded their own donors.
00:20:35
Speaker
We have these notebooks that reflect their original records.
00:20:40
Speaker
And they use paper labels.
00:20:42
Speaker
So this is 1309 from the United Schoon Machinery Corporation records.
00:20:48
Speaker
But it also has on the bottom, I'm just trying to see it so you can see it.
00:20:51
Speaker
Hopefully you can see it with the light.
00:20:53
Speaker
It says C period flats.
00:20:56
Speaker
And then it has some other marks, which probably relate to people who made shoes.
00:21:02
Speaker
They used to stamp the soles in various ways.
00:21:07
Speaker
And then I also wanted to point your attention to the fact how the shoe is constructed.
00:21:12
Speaker
So it has this great big thick shape.
00:21:14
Speaker
layered sole, which is nail.
00:21:17
Speaker
It's pegged.
00:21:18
Speaker
So these are wooden pegs that they had to hand hammer into the shoe.
00:21:24
Speaker
And then it's because this is a work shoe, it's been reinforced with metal.
00:21:29
Speaker
uh... like nails and that's what holes the sole onto the upper of the shoe these are all hand stitched uh... and they're from probably the second quarter of the nineteenth century maybe a little bit later
00:21:47
Speaker
And so I did research.
00:21:48
Speaker
What the United Shoe Corporation recorded was shoes of this type made in Danvers mass for slaves.
00:21:59
Speaker
That's what it said in the record for United Shoe.
00:22:02
Speaker
And then in some histories of Rowley and Georgetown,
00:22:07
Speaker
I came across some records that indicated that some of the manufacturers from this region sold their shoes, they shipped them to Boston, both by the train, because the train came up this way by the second quarter of the 19th century, or they could put them on vessels.
00:22:24
Speaker
And some of the local shoemakers were indeed shipping them to what they called a southern trade.
00:22:31
Speaker
And they could be for laborers like farm labor, farm hands, but they also were sold into the plantation system in the South.
00:22:43
Speaker
And it's like the textile industry with the cotton coming from the South up here.
00:22:47
Speaker
There's this lesser known angle of its connection to slavery.
00:22:53
Speaker
Okay, this is crazy, but it's dawning on me that we're actually going in reverse chronological order, starting with the Louboutins, then the mid-19th century whaling logbook, then these early 19th century shoes.
00:23:07
Speaker
And I think we should just keep turning our time machine back.
00:23:12
Speaker
But I do want to take a quick pit stop because if you're like me at this point, having heard just some snippets of the stories around a tiny handful of those hundreds of thousands of objects in the collection, you might be feeling, what's the word, maybe something like claustrophobia.
00:23:31
Speaker
Like there is just so much history and memory in this one place.
00:23:36
Speaker
How do you even grapple with that?
Curating the Collection: Acquisition and Deaccessioning
00:23:39
Speaker
And you know what the really crazy thing is?
00:23:41
Speaker
They're adding more all the time.
00:23:45
Speaker
And all of that was running through my mind when I asked curator Karina Corrigan about, well, let's just hear it.
00:23:53
Speaker
I sort of wonder, you know, often when you read in the press about museum acquisitions, it's major objects that they intend to put directly into a gallery.
00:24:05
Speaker
They
00:24:06
Speaker
may have already made space for it by the time they make the decision to buy it.
00:24:11
Speaker
But obviously that's not everything.
00:24:13
Speaker
In a collection of 850,000 pieces, only a small fraction of those are gonna be on display at any given time.
00:24:21
Speaker
So, how would you think about the process of acquiring something that might not be ready to be put out on the floor of the museum, that might go straight into the collection center, it might be under the radar, it might not be something on the front page of the art newspaper.
00:24:38
Speaker
I would say for the most part, things we are acquiring now are things we anticipate we will use soon, if not immediately, but soon in the galleries.
00:24:52
Speaker
And there have to be pretty compelling reasons to take things that we don't anticipate having an opportunity to get out soon.
00:25:02
Speaker
Having said that,
00:25:06
Speaker
We are in the process of acquiring a really important collection of principally 19th century Japanese cloisonne, which was assembled by a man named Fred Schneider in New York.
00:25:19
Speaker
And we sadly lost him last September, but he was really interested in having the collection stay together as a study collection.
00:25:30
Speaker
So he knew that we will never have more than, you know, one or two or 10
00:25:37
Speaker
pieces from his collection on display in the galleries in Salem.
00:25:42
Speaker
In fact, the very last time he visited, he visited this space and was so excited to think about people being able to come here and do as comprehensive a study of
00:25:56
Speaker
of Japanese cloisonne as possible.
00:25:59
Speaker
So that's a very different kind of acquisition, an expensive acquisition.
00:26:04
Speaker
And I will say it came with a seven-figure gift to make that possible because, as I'm sure Angela talked to you, it's expensive to store things well.
00:26:16
Speaker
But he was committed to that, and so we have now committed to that ourselves.
00:26:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yeah, we often don't think about the resources that go into maintaining the collection.
00:26:25
Speaker
It's not just about giving the big important object.
00:26:29
Speaker
It's about making it possible to keep that object and preserve it.
00:26:34
Speaker
Preserve it, conserve it.
00:26:37
Speaker
Even the process of making it available to future scholars has a cost associated with that, from staffing, from electricity, from heat.
00:26:47
Speaker
all of these have an expense associated with them.
00:26:51
Speaker
And so that's important as we're thinking about acquiring things is what are those costs and can we sustain them?
00:27:00
Speaker
Because museums, unlike private collectors, when we are acquiring something, we are acquiring it in perpetuity.
00:27:11
Speaker
So forever is a long time.
00:27:13
Speaker
Right, so deaccessions are, are they rare or are they nonexistent?
00:27:19
Speaker
They've been nonexistent for about 25 years.
00:27:22
Speaker
I think one of the things that is important, certainly many museums deaccessioned in the past,
00:27:29
Speaker
One of the things for me with deaccessioning is that you need to know what you have in order to decide what you could hypothetically get rid of.
00:27:37
Speaker
And since we don't know what we have in a way that feels comprehensive enough,
00:27:46
Speaker
part of the purpose, part of the journey of coming into this building will be to learn much, much more about the collection and be able to say, I mean, we have 19 Chinese export sewing tables.
00:27:59
Speaker
I would argue maybe we need all 19 because we are a global center for the study of Asian export art.
00:28:06
Speaker
But other people might argue we don't need that many.
00:28:10
Speaker
But I think you need to understand
00:28:13
Speaker
what all 19 are and be able to make decisions about can we tell different narratives with each of these things.
00:28:21
Speaker
Interesting.
00:28:23
Speaker
So this center in a funny way could actually be a part of opening conversations about what really belongs here, what's really essential, and what might have a future life out in the world.
00:28:35
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:28:38
Speaker
It's a long, that's a long process, and I think it's something we do very carefully.
00:28:44
Speaker
Museums do, it's complicated to deaccession.
00:28:50
Speaker
There are a lot of safeguards to ensure that we're not going to regret decisions we make, you know, for our successors 150 years from now.
00:29:00
Speaker
So it's time consuming, and that's part of the reason that I think a lot of institutions don't.
00:29:08
Speaker
And particularly given the unique history of this institution, something that is very inconsequential that was acquired in 1820, that's important in and of itself for understanding what was important in 1820 to people who were assembling the museum.
00:29:29
Speaker
Right, the meta history of the collection.
00:29:33
Speaker
I'm getting us a little off topic here.
00:29:37
Speaker
No, but I think it is central to the work of this site because, I mean, I love the fact that we're on 30 acres because 100 years from now, who knows?
00:29:49
Speaker
Maybe there's another building here.
00:29:51
Speaker
But as big as this building is, it still will house a finite number of objects.
00:29:58
Speaker
And will 850,000 objects fit in here?
00:30:03
Speaker
safely, I'm not sure they will.
00:30:06
Speaker
So I think it's clear by now we could keep bringing out objects one after another until the end of time, give or take.
00:30:13
Speaker
And I hope Curious Objects will bring you back to PEM one of these days.
Rare Treasures: The Declaration of Independence and More
00:30:18
Speaker
But for now, our time machine has one more notch on it.
00:30:21
Speaker
And there's one more thing I promised I'd share with you.
00:30:24
Speaker
And Dan Lipkin will do the honors.
00:30:27
Speaker
And the final thing, I thought you'd love to see a piece of paper worth $2.1 million.
00:30:32
Speaker
Who wouldn't?
00:30:34
Speaker
So this is one of six known contemporary broadside copies of the Declaration of Independence printed before July 16th, 1776.
00:30:45
Speaker
And this is the first one printed in Massachusetts.
00:30:49
Speaker
Can you just, for the sake of listeners and maybe myself, can you break down the different sorts of early printings of the Declaration of Independence and what the significance, because I know there are different tiers and of course different rarity, different value.
00:31:06
Speaker
What's the landscape of early declarations of independence?
00:31:10
Speaker
So once the Congress approved and ratified the text on July 4th, that text was given to a printer in Philadelphia named John Dunlap, who printed, we think, about 200 copies of that text in broadside.
00:31:24
Speaker
And then John Hancock, as the president of the Congress, wanted to disseminate the text to the rest of the colonies.
00:31:31
Speaker
And so the Dunlap broadside got sent out throughout the colonies.
00:31:35
Speaker
And what you see happening is
00:31:38
Speaker
as you get further away from July 4th, is you get this kind of radiating appearance of the text of the Declaration in local newspapers as that broadside in this text moves up the coast.
00:31:51
Speaker
So you see it start appearing in newspapers in Baltimore and in Trenton and then in New York and then in Hartford and radiating out from Philadelphia.
00:32:01
Speaker
So that's how you get these tiers of
00:32:04
Speaker
you know, what's important, right?
00:32:05
Speaker
The broadsides weren't necessarily meant to survive.
00:32:10
Speaker
They were meant to be posted up so people could read them and they were either torn down or maybe they didn't, or maybe they were destroyed in the printing, the reprinting of it in another format.
00:32:23
Speaker
We know that this one is from Salem because the Salem version is the only one with four columns of text.
00:32:31
Speaker
and it was printed in the shop of Ezekiel Russell.
00:32:36
Speaker
And we know it was printed before July 16th because this same typesetting version appeared in a Salem newspaper called the American Gazette on July 16th.
00:32:47
Speaker
With a couple of changes that indicate that this was printed first and then adjustments were made to fit the newspaper format a bit better.
00:32:56
Speaker
This was the source material for the newspaper print.
00:32:59
Speaker
And the American Gazette was also printed in Ezekiel Russell's shop.
00:33:02
Speaker
So we know that there's that strong connection there.
00:33:07
Speaker
So part of the calculus of value is rarity, how many of these are there.
00:33:13
Speaker
So for example, there are more copies known, I believe, of the Boston edition of the Broadside, which came a little bit after Salem.
00:33:19
Speaker
But this is obviously a core document in American history.
00:33:24
Speaker
And a copy of this came up for sale last May at Christie's from the collection of Bill Reese, William Reese, who was a really well-known book dealer.
00:33:35
Speaker
and really highly respected, had an amazing personal collection, and it sold for $2.1 million.
00:33:42
Speaker
So we didn't pay $2.1 million for this.
00:33:45
Speaker
This has been here a very long time.
00:33:47
Speaker
I saw the one at Christie's, but I didn't see it quite this close.
00:33:53
Speaker
Glad to get you a look at it.
00:33:56
Speaker
I think the one at Christie's did not have a stain here in the lower middle.
00:34:00
Speaker
That's true.
00:34:02
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's...
00:34:05
Speaker
It sends shivers up my spine.
00:34:07
Speaker
It's amazing, right?
00:34:09
Speaker
It's really quite an artifact.
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:11
Speaker
And on the back here, if I could turn it over, there is, so it's been kind of backed with this rice paper, and that was done by NEDCC in January of 1975.
00:34:23
Speaker
So we know we've had it at least that long.
00:34:26
Speaker
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
00:34:27
Speaker
But my guess is that it's been here a very, very long time.
00:34:29
Speaker
Right.
00:34:30
Speaker
And I think they probably also repaired some of the tears here in the folds that you see.
00:34:36
Speaker
Kind of made it nice.
00:34:38
Speaker
So I hope that gives you some sense of the breadth of material that we have.
00:34:42
Speaker
You know, I feel very, very fortunate to work here.
00:34:44
Speaker
It's a really wonderful and rich collection.
00:34:47
Speaker
It deserves to be known better.
00:34:47
Speaker
Thank you.
00:34:55
Speaker
Well, that's a few objects down and only 800,000 more to go.
00:35:01
Speaker
The good news is thanks to the collection center, more and more and more of these stories are visible and accessible, even if they aren't lit up behind glass in the museum.
00:35:11
Speaker
And if you're investigating a question that these objects can answer, you just might have a shot.
00:35:17
Speaker
I'd love to hear what you find out.
00:35:20
Speaker
Thanks again to the Peabody Essex Museum, to Dinah Carton, Angela Segala, Dan Lipkin, Karina Corrigan, and Paola Richter.
00:35:29
Speaker
And thanks to all of you for listening and coming along for the ride.
00:35:34
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati, with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
00:35:40
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:35:44
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.