Trip to Princeton and Yale

A few weeks ago I took a work trip back East. We spent two days meeting with the Papers of Thomas Jefferson staff at Princeton in New Jersey and then a day at Yale in New Haven, CT, visiting the staff of both the Works of Jonathan Edwards and the Papers of Benjamin Franklin. It was really fun to talk to people who do the same thing I do and trade ideas. And those are some really prestigious universities. Very different feeling, though. Princeton was very pastoral and small-town feeling. We had an evening get-together at the managing editor's house, and it was a beautiful colonial-looking house on a half acre in a beautiful neighborhood. Yale, by contrast, is in the middle of busy, dirty city. But Yale has the most amazing library I've ever been in.

The first night, we flew into Newark and decided to drive to Manhattan. Had delicious pizza at Lombardi's (supposedly the oldest pizza parlor in the U.S.) and I accidentally led the other car into driving to Brooklyn.

We visited Pearl Street, where Joseph Smith visited in 1832 and wrote this letter describing NYC to his wife.

At Princeton we got a VIP tour of some cool buildings, including this space, which was the original library.

We also also visited Nassau Hall, the oldest university building, built in 1754. Princeton served as the U.S. capital briefly during the Revolutionary War, and this building changed hands between the Americans and British. It still has a cannonball mark on it. And it housed the Continental Congress.

This is the inside of Nassau Hall. It has portraits of all the university presidents, including Jonathan Edwards and Woodrow Wilson. The portrait on the left is of George Washington, painted during his life.

This is the outside of the Beinecke Library at Yale. It holds their rare books and special collections. The squares are a translucent marble.

Here's the inside. That cube is four stories of rare books on all four sides, things like Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica and

the Gutenberg Bible.

Here's the sun shining through the marble. I was quite taken with this library. We did some Mormon history research here (the special collections reading room is in the basement), and I looked at the papers of Annie Dillard, who wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Very cool. The next day we got to look at some amazing, 300-year-old Jonathan Edwards documents, like the manuscript copy of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon.

The main library at Yale, the Sterling Library, is where the Benjamin Franklin Papers project is housed. The building is designed like a cathedral, though all the artwork is secular rather than religious.