Jay Walker’s Library
of Human Imagination

For anyone who toils in the creative realm, surrounding oneself with sources of inspiration is vital to survival.

While the muse often manifests in the strangest places at the most unexpected times, she’s notoriously fickle, often ignoring even the most desperate distress calls. Mystifying and unreliable is the muse, and creators cannot idly wait for some outside force to trigger the cogs of the imagination.

Art begets art.

Yet, the creative process inherently demands recurrent sparks of inspiration. The presence of art, in its multitudinous incarnations, emits such an energy to kindle the nerve endings of the mind’s eye. Personal libraries—of books, of music, of movies, of art and other creations—offer a milieu conducive to creative work, filling a space with spirits that urge us to imagine and re-imagine, to continually seek new knowledge, to see the possibilities in and of our artistic endeavors. Art begets art, creativity breeds creativity.

Jay Walker knows this.

For more than 30 years, throughout his adult life, Walker has been amassing a large collection of books; for the last 20 years, he has added countless artifacts, along with rare books and manuscripts, to his treasury. Without a dedicated room to house his growing collection, books and other items spread throughout his home, occupying any suitable space in various rooms. But Walker had an idea—one that would not only solve the practical issue of storage but also bring together the pieces of his vast, unique collection in inspiring yet functional fashion.

“I’m an inventor by trade,” said Walker, founder of Priceline.com and Walker Digital chairman/lead inventor, during our conversation last week. “Why not build a library of human imagination?”

Ten years ago Walker’s vision transformed into a concrete design, as part of construction plans for his Connecticut home, with the help and expertise of architect Mark Finlay. Five years later, the three-tier, 3,600-square-foot Library of Human Imagination was born. In September 2008, Walker allowed the media (Wired senior writer Steven Levy and a photographer) inside for the first time, offering a glimpse of the remarkable library and its contents. “Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker’s library,” Levy writes, calling it ”the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride.”

The Morgan Library, Walker told me, served as a sort of template. And while that influence is evident, his library incorporates some thoroughly modern twists, from the computer-controlled illuminated glass panels that through its etchings chronicle 5,000 years of human imagination to a glass bridge suspended in space symbolizing “a leap of imagination.” Then there’s the Escher effect, conspicuous in the wood tiles designed by Walker himself and the “labyrinthine platforms” that, as Levy describes them, “seem to float in space.” So does the original Sputnik 1 satellite—a shining example of the amazing artifacts that elevate the library to something above and beyond simply an architectural/design gem. Several of his items provided the backdrop for the 2008 TED Conference stage, where Walker conducted a brief show-and-tell (of the artifacts and the library). “So how do we create? And part of the question that I’ve answered,” Walker told the TED audience, “is that we create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli, with human achievement, with history, with the things that drive us and make us human.”

With his company attracting much of his attention, Walker, who holds more than 800 issued or pending patents and “uses creativity everyday,” said he doesn’t get to spend as much time in the library as he would like. He does, however, make a point of convening many of his meetings and brainstorming sessions with Walker Digital‘s top inventors in the library.

“It’s impossible not the be inspired,” Walker said, “no different than walking into a museum as an artist.” He added that the surroundings also “provide a lot of humility,” contextualizing his own achievements within the wide and grand scope of past advancements.

“This is not a religion, but it serves much as a cathedral would,” he said of the “wonderfully broad and spectacular room.”

“Constant learning is the key to creativity.” —Jay Walker

As for the books that line the shelves, which he surprisingly doesn’t catalogue, Walker estimates his collection to include somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 volumes. Walker is not a first-edition hawk, especially when it comes to the nonfiction tomes dealing with specific topics, such as science and its numerous branches of study. “First editions are not always the best edition,” he said, adding that it is not uncommon for a book to improve with subsequent editions, either in condition or in the information it contains. “It’s about how does the book involve the modern reader.” Walker doesn’t have a list of favorites (“treasures, yes”) or books he finds himself pulling off the shelf more frequently then others. When hosting guests from around the world, often experts in various fields, he enjoys sharing his collection, pointing them to books he thinks would be of interest to them—an opportunity for him, he said, to learn.

“Constant learning is the key to creativity,” Walker said, “making connections previously unseen.”

His collection is ever evolving—a puzzle not yet complete. ”That’s part of the fun of it,” Walker said. “I’m always looking for things not well represented in the library, things that fill in pieces of human history.” With a library like this one, he added, those items now have tendency to find him.

Walker exudes passion when discussing his Library of Human Imagination, tempered only by a genuine humbleness, seeing himself as simply the “custodian of the collection.” And even though Walker’s library, both the physical space and its contents, transcends—in quality and quantity—the typical notion of home library, he thinks and talks about it no differently than someone with a fraction of the books in a room a hundred times smaller.

“What any great library does is look back at the history of human imagination; it’s a passion, a passionate hobby,” Walker said. “You don’t own the books, the books own you.”

For future generations, “books” will be anything but the books of today. Like Gutenberg‘s invention did nearly 600 years earlier, some new technology will soon revolutionize the production, distribution, consumption, and storage of books.

“We’re at the end of the age of the printed book,” Walker said. “Ink on paper will be gone in our lifetime.”

As someone who loves books, in my hand and on my shelves, I struggle to embrace his premonition—one that is, by all accounts, more probable than plausible. But Walker, an obvious lover of printed books himself, sees the change as a positive progression.

“Freezing ink on paper doesn’t make sense,” he said, adding that its limitations are innumerable. “The book is a delivery system, and there are more efficient systems on the horizon.”

Look at the iPod, Walker said, which enables larger music collections, allows more creativity from more artists, and gives more people access. And he’s right. I long ago eschewed CDs and DVDs for iTunes and digital files, allowing me to purchase new music and movies with the click of the mouse whenever I want, expanding my collection of music and movies exponentially (and shrinking my bank account). I read newspapers online, enabling me to access publications across the globe otherwise unavailable to me. But I still find it difficult to imagine reading a “book” on some kind of electronic device, rather than on pages between two covers.

“It’s not a great loss,” Walker said, especially when you’ll have more people reading, thanks to a delivery system that makes texts more widely and readily available. “People with a passion for books like me and you will always collect them and have libraries full of them, but it’s like lamenting the end of the LP.”

American essayist Norman Cousins once said, “A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas—a place where history comes to life.”

So don’t be surprised if Walker, spurred by his surroundings in the Library of Human Imagination, becomes the 21st century Gutenberg and changes the way we all read for the next several hundred years.