Jay Walker is best known as the guy who created Priceline, but he’s really more interesting for his personal obsessions than for his business ventures. Walker’s poured a lot of his Internet wealth into creating the Library of Human Imagination, a mind-blowing private collection in his Connecticut home that is the realization of his catholic tastes in historical and contemporary artifacts.
Walker shows off an authentic Apollo in-flight manual. (Image by Steve Jurvetson.)
The three-story 3,600-square-foot building was the subject of a really fun piece in Wired in 2008. That article provided a tour of some of the highlights of Walker’s overwhelming inventory: a Gutenberg Bible, a Sputnik satellite, a field tool kit for Civil War surgeons, the napkin on which FDR outlined his plan to win WWII, a 300,000,000-year-old fossil, meteorite fragments, the chandelier from the James Bond film Die Another Day, an Apple II motherboard signed by Steve Wozniak, the first 16th-century maps that included North and South America, etc.
Walker gave a TED talk (also in 2008), playing show-and-tell with some of his treasures. In talking about creativity, he echoed what neuroscientists have been telling us fo some time: “Once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.”
