"One of the poster children of our exhibition," said Cynthia Burlingham, pointing to an exquisitely detailed drawing of a flea roughly the size of a puppy.
The flea is pictured in the book "Micrographia," published in London in 1665 and noteworthy for having some of the earliest engravings of creatures as they appeared under a microscope. To some degree, the artist was winging it. Observed Burlingham, "As someone said, 'Have you ever looked through a 17th century microscope?"'
Burlingham, a senior curator at the UCLA Hammer Museum, was leading the way through the current exhibition, "The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles," which she helped to organize.
It is, to say the least, a study in eclecticism. Together with the flea, there are:
A 1933 King Kong poster, a printed Japanese scroll from the 8th century exhibited with an 8-inch wooden pagoda that once housed it in a Buddhist temple; a 1970 copy of the Black Panther magazine and a box of 19th century glass eyes from Germany, neatly displayed.
In a feat described by one spokeswoman as akin to "herding cats," the Hammer has gathered treasures from 32 L.A.-area special collections libraries--posters, books, photographs, maps, paintings, prints--a collection that belies any concept of Los Angeles as a city with no literary or cultural pedigree.
"Most people, when they hear you're doing a library exhibit, they [sarcastically] say, 'Wow, how exciting,"' says Burlingham. "They've been amazed."
Now, she is pointing out Euclid's "Elements of Geometry" (1570), with its three-dimensional paper pyramids--"The first pop-up book." Next, she's standing before a case displaying Amelia Earhart's log from the first transatlantic flight by a woman (1928), with the aviatrix as passenger in a tri-motor Fokker piloted by Wilmer Stultz. She wrote, presciently, "The essence of adventure is risk--probably the risk of life." She would disappear nine years later in the Pacific while circumnavigating the globe.
Displayed close by is a faded letter from Earhart to her then fiance, George Putnam, of the publishing family, in which she makes it clear that, on her part at least, this is no mad love affair. She describes her reluctance to marry, for fear it will impede her career, states she would not hold him to "any medieval code of faithfulness" and asks that he promise to free her after a year of marriage "if we find no happiness together."
