Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: Last week, we set off on an adventure through the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And that's all well and good, but we're here for the stories, right?
Speaker: Well, that's what I set out to find in the collection center, and boy did I find them.
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.
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.
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?
Speaker: A $2 million piece of paper?
Speaker: And probably even more that I'm forgetting about right now.
Speaker: Oh yeah, operating heavy machinery and moving giant statues.
Speaker: Yeah, we've got a lot going on today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: With that said, thanks for listening, and let's get to it.
Speaker: Should we start with shoes?
Speaker: Let's start with shoes.
Speaker: Last week, we heard from curator Paolo Richter about an 18th century Persian shoe.
Speaker: How about a 21st century French shoe?
Speaker: Can we even put that in a podcast about antiques?
Speaker: Does France count as a far distant exotic land?
Speaker: Let's see if my editor cuts this part.
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.
Speaker: Yes, speaking of red heels.
Speaker: And I have to be careful so I don't puncture myself here, but there they are.
Speaker: There's the red soles.
Speaker: Trademarked color.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But these now the tops are black, but the most noticeable feature is these metal studs covering the entire surface.
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.
Speaker: Prickly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They came to the museum through a collection associated with a Boston fashion entrepreneur, a woman named Marilyn Reisman.
Speaker: And she owned a boutique called Apogee on Newbury Street in Boston.
Speaker: And it was called Apogee because she tried to carry the most avant-garde fashion in Boston.
Speaker: So whatever...
Speaker: Lord & Taylor and Saks and all the department stores were carrying in Boston.
Speaker: She wanted to be at least a couple of steps ahead in terms of avant-garde fashion.
Speaker: we were able to acquire after she passed away.
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.
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.
Speaker: And
Speaker: her wardrobe evolved a lot over time.
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.
Speaker: So there were several additional decades that she lived that they were no longer in her possession.
Speaker: I don't know what happened to her earlier clothes, but
Speaker: So these were while she was still working with her company in Boston.
Speaker: And by the time she was wrapping it up, she had gravitated.
Speaker: She started out with kind of classic high-end fashion.
Speaker: So she loved Chanel and a number of other French designers.
Speaker: And then in the 90s, 80s, 90s, into the early 2000s,
Speaker: she gravitated first to avant-garde European designers, so she moved to the Belgian designers.
Speaker: And so we were able to acquire Anne de Mühle Meester, Martin Margiela, some of the other Belgian and avant-garde designers
Speaker: designers from the recent past through her collection.
Speaker: And then she moved to Japanese fashion.
Speaker: And I would see there were not a lot of fashion followers wearing avant-garde.
Speaker: So this would be Yoji Yamamoto, Comme des Garcons, Rei Kawakubo.
Speaker: they really were doing fashion like no one else at the time.
Speaker: And so we were able to acquire these wonderful Japanese pieces.
Speaker: And of course, PEM has a historic Japanese collection that has its own unique story.
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...
Speaker: an influencer at the time with what was being sold in Boston and also showing it, her own wardrobe.
Speaker: She's very socially well-connected in Boston.
Speaker: And so these are a pair of her shoes.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: And I love the sort of continuing tradition of trans-Pacific exchange, cultural connection.
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.
Speaker: But they weren't on pleasure cruises.
Speaker: By the mid-19th century, New England was the world's leading producer of whale oil.
Speaker: In 1846, there were more than 700 whaling vessels active out of New England ports, and each ship had its logbook.
Speaker: And these weren't necessarily the dry matter-of-fact record books you might be picturing.
Speaker: And what I love about this journal is it's got everything, right?
Speaker: So it's got watercolors of the boat itself on the water.
Speaker: It has on the title page here, it has a list of the crew, which is actually fairly rare in log books.
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.
Speaker: It's got lots of little watercolors of the ship on the sea.
Speaker: You've got a little watercolor there of three whale's tails sticking up from the ocean.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: There's guys in a rowboat here, presumably rowing out to harpoon a whale.
Speaker: That's Dan Lipkin, director of the Penn Library.
Speaker: He's talking about the logbook of the chase from the years 1839 to 1840.
Speaker: So are these sort of, shall we say, useful illustrations in that they help the reader to understand what's happening?
Speaker: Or are they more sort of doodles and, you know, pastime?
Speaker: Well, I think it's probably a combination.
Speaker: They are...
Speaker: decoration in a way, they're illuminations of this manuscript, if you will.
Speaker: But they also give you a sense of what's going on during the voyage.
Speaker: So here's a whale stamp.
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.
Speaker: You see whaling activity on the bottom here.
Speaker: Here's a whale being harpooned.
Speaker: These ships are actually boiling the blubber down.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: It's got landscapes, you know, like this, views of towns on the sea.
Speaker: In the back here, we have vessels spoken by the brig chase.
Speaker: So we actually...
Speaker: know when the chase encountered the Triton right out of war in Rhode Island.
Speaker: And we have, we have, we index these occurrences of ships meeting on the open water.
Speaker: So these are boats from Wareham, Massachusetts, Rochester, which is also Massachusetts near New Bedford, New Bedford.
Speaker: So a lot of these are whale ships, the brown, the Emerald from Salem.
Speaker: And that rightmost column.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: 200 barrels.
Speaker: Barrels, right.
Speaker: 125 barrels.
Speaker: Is that the cargo of this?
Speaker: This is the cargo of the ship.
Speaker: So they were recording how well these ships were doing on their whaling journeys.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Which is something of interest to others, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: This is a track of how many whales were harpooned or captured by the different boats that were on the voyage.
Speaker: So the three boats, as you can see, S-boat here, was done the best during the voyage, right?
Speaker: Every time they captured a whale, they would mark it down for that particular whale boat.
Speaker: Provisions, signal flags, there's...
Speaker: There's poems here.
Speaker: Poetry.
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.
Speaker: They really were bored.
Speaker: There was some time in between whales.
Speaker: There are sea shanties in here, songs.
Speaker: There's a panel here of several watercolors of the boat.
Speaker: So a gam was when ships met on the open water and essentially had a party.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I had note cards printed with this illustration that I send out if I want to send a thank you.
Speaker: So killing a sperm whale...
Speaker: Our larboard boat stove, so a whale has broken the larboard boat, three boats and a chase.
Speaker: You can see the whales there on the water.
Speaker: It's just really, it's kind of like the perfect logbook, and very few of them are like this, you know.
Speaker: And we don't really collect whaling journals.
Speaker: we kind of leave that to New Bedford and to Mystic.
Speaker: You know, we're more interested in trade and merchant activity.
Speaker: But, you know, something like this is just so charming and really, really wonderful.
Speaker: Justifiable exception.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, so...
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.
Speaker: So some of these drawings are probably about what's going on on a given day.
Speaker: And like I said, some of them are just decorations.
Speaker: That's a fantastic volume.
Speaker: Yes, I agree.
Speaker: And this is actually digitized and available on our internet archive page.
Speaker: FYI, Dan isn't lying.
Speaker: We'll put a link to look through this book in the show notes and online at the magazine antiques.com slash podcast.
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.
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.
Speaker: The rest of the building, well, it's chock full of objects, but it's still a work in progress.
Speaker: And I don't know about you, but I love a good work in progress.
Speaker: So I asked Angela Segala, you remember her from last week.
Speaker: She is the director of the collection center.
Speaker: I asked Angela, how many objects are in this room?
Speaker: Well, there's about 50,000.
Speaker: With the photography, oh gosh, with photography, I would say closer to about 75,000 objects in here.
Speaker: And what fraction of Penn's collection does that represent?
Speaker: A small one.
Speaker: So our collection, really amazing and vast.
Speaker: It is not encyclopedic.
Speaker: However, a lot of our smaller decorative arts pieces are still in Salem.
Speaker: We believe the collection numbers about 800,000 pieces.
Speaker: So it is a small amount.
Speaker: But we, like I said, we have plans.
Speaker: We've been working with our architect for over 10 years.
Speaker: And we're about to start putting these plans in action.
Speaker: So very soon we'll be moving those things here.
Speaker: Our intent is to put almost everything in this building, with the exception of some of the architectural pieces, the historic houses, buildings,
Speaker: do have some things housed in them that are storage material.
Speaker: And that doesn't mean that they're subpar.
Speaker: It means that that's the space we had.
Speaker: In fact, nothing is...
Speaker: in a particular location based on its quality.
Speaker: It's always where it is because of space.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Let's just walk all the way up this next aisle so that you can see some of the photography boxes.
Speaker: So these were once located in the basement of East India Marine Hall.
Speaker: um which is the oldest part of phalem and they were in the basement it was a very small stairwell going 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
Speaker: including the cabinets that I'll show you next door.
Speaker: So about 60 plus thousand objects were lifted vi a a gantry from the basement up to the main floor.
Speaker: And we've moved the entire archaeology collection three times now.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Boy, you've had your work cut out for you.
Speaker: But it's always fun.
Speaker: You always learn something.
Speaker: You always get a new view of the institution.
Speaker: It's just invigorating.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So to ask a potentially uncomfortable question, what have been your scariest moments in the process of moving these objects around?
Speaker: Well, let's see.
Speaker: I think that some of the scarier moments are the things that are heavy and large.
Speaker: And I spend a lot of time preparing.
Speaker: I spend a lot of time preparing with very knowledgeable people.
Speaker: So by the time we start moving those pieces, we have a plan.
Speaker: So my fear gets managed, I should say.
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.
Speaker: And I think that, gosh, we moved a large piece of sculpture into
Speaker: Madea, marble.
Speaker: The crate is over there and you cannot see her.
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.
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.
Speaker: But we put so much thought into the planning of these things that the risk is as minimal as it can possibly be.
Speaker: So, you know.
Speaker: all the strapping is tested, the, you know, use appropriate equipment.
Speaker: It's when you do things quickly and without thinking it through that, you know,
Speaker: things can happen.
Speaker: And luckily when it comes to those bigger pieces, we do take our time.
Speaker: Now that doesn't mean that the moving projects had a lot of time associated with them.
Speaker: We had to snap to it and we packed 30,000 objects in a year and a half.
Speaker: We had a
Speaker: staff of eight people on our side and then we also hired an art packing company to help us.
Speaker: So we had about eight people helping.
Speaker: So it was quite an enterprise.
Speaker: Gosh, I mean, that's 100 objects a day.
Speaker: It's a lot for eight people to go through.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: They were very good at it and we just kept our eye on the ball.
Speaker: Should we do some more shoes?
Speaker: Let's do some more shoes.
Speaker: But this time, let's make them old.
Speaker: Shoemaking was a huge industry here on the North Shore of Massachusetts and throughout Massachusetts.
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.
Speaker: I think
Speaker: people know more about the textile industry that was here, but the shoe industry was also here.
Speaker: And it does continue on in New England to today, actually.
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.
Speaker: But then these factories started, particularly in Lynn, Massachusetts, or in Haverhill, which is up along the Merrimack River Valley.
Speaker: And they grew exponentially.
Speaker: It was a leading shoemaking area in the country, which is kind of an almost forgotten chapter of American history.
Speaker: So we're looking now, this is a colossal, colossal shoe.
Speaker: It's also not, I would say, decorative.
Speaker: It's incredibly plain.
Speaker: It looks very practical, workaday, brown, almost black leather.
Speaker: And again, it might have been Paul Bunyan's shoe.
Speaker: It's...
Speaker: It's this must be a size 14.
Speaker: Well, this is this is this relates directly to shoe manufacturing in the local area again.
Speaker: And this shoe was part of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation collection.
Speaker: And they kept their own records.
Speaker: So they recorded their own donors.
Speaker: We have these notebooks that reflect their original records.
Speaker: And they use paper labels.
Speaker: So this is 1309 from the United Schoon Machinery Corporation records.
Speaker: But it also has on the bottom, I'm just trying to see it so you can see it.
Speaker: Hopefully you can see it with the light.
Speaker: It says C period flats.
Speaker: And then it has some other marks, which probably relate to people who made shoes.
Speaker: They used to stamp the soles in various ways.
Speaker: And then I also wanted to point your attention to the fact how the shoe is constructed.
Speaker: So it has this great big thick shape.
Speaker: layered sole, which is nail.
Speaker: It's pegged.
Speaker: So these are wooden pegs that they had to hand hammer into the shoe.
Speaker: And then it's because this is a work shoe, it's been reinforced with metal.
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
Speaker: And so I did research.
Speaker: What the United Shoe Corporation recorded was shoes of this type made in Danvers mass for slaves.
Speaker: That's what it said in the record for United Shoe.
Speaker: And then in some histories of Rowley and Georgetown,
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.
Speaker: And some of the local shoemakers were indeed shipping them to what they called a southern trade.
Speaker: And they could be for laborers like farm labor, farm hands, but they also were sold into the plantation system in the South.
Speaker: And it's like the textile industry with the cotton coming from the South up here.
Speaker: There's this lesser known angle of its connection to slavery.
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.
Speaker: And I think we should just keep turning our time machine back.
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.
Speaker: Like there is just so much history and memory in this one place.
Speaker: How do you even grapple with that?
Speaker: And you know what the really crazy thing is?
Speaker: They're adding more all the time.
Speaker: And all of that was running through my mind when I asked curator Karina Corrigan about, well, let's just hear it.
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.
Speaker: They
Speaker: may have already made space for it by the time they make the decision to buy it.
Speaker: But obviously that's not everything.
Speaker: In a collection of 850,000 pieces, only a small fraction of those are gonna be on display at any given time.
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.
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.
Speaker: And there have to be pretty compelling reasons to take things that we don't anticipate having an opportunity to get out soon.
Speaker: Having said that,
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.
Speaker: And we sadly lost him last September, but he was really interested in having the collection stay together as a study collection.
Speaker: So he knew that we will never have more than, you know, one or two or 10
Speaker: pieces from his collection on display in the galleries in Salem.
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
Speaker: of Japanese cloisonne as possible.
Speaker: So that's a very different kind of acquisition, an expensive acquisition.
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.
Speaker: But he was committed to that, and so we have now committed to that ourselves.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, we often don't think about the resources that go into maintaining the collection.
Speaker: It's not just about giving the big important object.
Speaker: It's about making it possible to keep that object and preserve it.
Speaker: Preserve it, conserve it.
Speaker: Even the process of making it available to future scholars has a cost associated with that, from staffing, from electricity, from heat.
Speaker: all of these have an expense associated with them.
Speaker: And so that's important as we're thinking about acquiring things is what are those costs and can we sustain them?
Speaker: Because museums, unlike private collectors, when we are acquiring something, we are acquiring it in perpetuity.
Speaker: So forever is a long time.
Speaker: Right, so deaccessions are, are they rare or are they nonexistent?
Speaker: They've been nonexistent for about 25 years.
Speaker: I think one of the things that is important, certainly many museums deaccessioned in the past,
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.
Speaker: And since we don't know what we have in a way that feels comprehensive enough,
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.
Speaker: I would argue maybe we need all 19 because we are a global center for the study of Asian export art.
Speaker: But other people might argue we don't need that many.
Speaker: But I think you need to understand
Speaker: what all 19 are and be able to make decisions about can we tell different narratives with each of these things.
Speaker: Interesting.
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.
Speaker: Right, right, right.
Speaker: It's a long, that's a long process, and I think it's something we do very carefully.
Speaker: Museums do, it's complicated to deaccession.
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.
Speaker: So it's time consuming, and that's part of the reason that I think a lot of institutions don't.
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.
Speaker: Right, the meta history of the collection.
Speaker: I'm getting us a little off topic here.
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?
Speaker: Maybe there's another building here.
Speaker: But as big as this building is, it still will house a finite number of objects.
Speaker: And will 850,000 objects fit in here?
Speaker: safely, I'm not sure they will.
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.
Speaker: And I hope Curious Objects will bring you back to PEM one of these days.
Speaker: But for now, our time machine has one more notch on it.
Speaker: And there's one more thing I promised I'd share with you.
Speaker: And Dan Lipkin will do the honors.
Speaker: And the final thing, I thought you'd love to see a piece of paper worth $2.1 million.
Speaker: Who wouldn't?
Speaker: So this is one of six known contemporary broadside copies of the Declaration of Independence printed before July 16th, 1776.
Speaker: And this is the first one printed in Massachusetts.
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.
Speaker: What's the landscape of early declarations of independence?
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.
Speaker: And then John Hancock, as the president of the Congress, wanted to disseminate the text to the rest of the colonies.
Speaker: And so the Dunlap broadside got sent out throughout the colonies.
Speaker: And what you see happening is
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.
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.
Speaker: So that's how you get these tiers of
Speaker: you know, what's important, right?
Speaker: The broadsides weren't necessarily meant to survive.
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.
Speaker: We know that this one is from Salem because the Salem version is the only one with four columns of text.
Speaker: and it was printed in the shop of Ezekiel Russell.
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.
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.
Speaker: This was the source material for the newspaper print.
Speaker: And the American Gazette was also printed in Ezekiel Russell's shop.
Speaker: So we know that there's that strong connection there.
Speaker: So part of the calculus of value is rarity, how many of these are there.
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.
Speaker: But this is obviously a core document in American history.
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.
Speaker: and really highly respected, had an amazing personal collection, and it sold for $2.1 million.
Speaker: So we didn't pay $2.1 million for this.
Speaker: This has been here a very long time.
Speaker: I saw the one at Christie's, but I didn't see it quite this close.
Speaker: Glad to get you a look at it.
Speaker: I think the one at Christie's did not have a stain here in the lower middle.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it's...
Speaker: It sends shivers up my spine.
Speaker: It's amazing, right?
Speaker: It's really quite an artifact.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: So we know we've had it at least that long.
Speaker: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Speaker: But my guess is that it's been here a very, very long time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think they probably also repaired some of the tears here in the folds that you see.
Speaker: Kind of made it nice.
Speaker: So I hope that gives you some sense of the breadth of material that we have.
Speaker: You know, I feel very, very fortunate to work here.
Speaker: It's a really wonderful and rich collection.
Speaker: It deserves to be known better.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Well, that's a few objects down and only 800,000 more to go.
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.
Speaker: And if you're investigating a question that these objects can answer, you just might have a shot.
Speaker: I'd love to hear what you find out.
Speaker: Thanks again to the Peabody Essex Museum, to Dinah Carton, Angela Segala, Dan Lipkin, Karina Corrigan, and Paola Richter.
Speaker: And thanks to all of you for listening and coming along for the ride.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati, with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.
