As the head of Reference here at the APS, I have the opportunity to work with all aspects of the collection. Much of what I work on and see on a given day is the result of requests coming from our patrons both onsite and around the world. This is the nature of reference. The APS collections are truly world class and I have been lucky enough to work with and familiarize myself with a good portion of it. Perhaps my favorite object in the entire collection is the journal of Richard Beck.
Richard Beck was an English Quaker living in London who traveled around the United States and Canada for most of 1880. He used Philadelphia as his base as he visited locations ranging from Washington D.C. and New York to Yosemite and San Francisco. Beck also made his way into Montreal, where he noted a tax of $75 a year was levied on every commercial traveler entering Quebec.
This journal was how Beck documented his trip around North America. It is part diary, part scrapbook, and part sketchbook. Beck pressed in playbills and tickets from shows he’d seen at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, Chestnut Street Theater, and Broad Street Theater (where he saw one of the first Philadelphia showings of Pirates of the Penzance, which opened on Broadway the year prior).
He included amazing photographs of the White House, Yosemite Valley (10 years before it became National Park), mining camps in Colorado, and fancy hotels in San Francisco.
Beck also saved newspaper articles from his travels including an article on the construction of the Washington Monument while he was in D.C., sketches by Beck of things that interested him, diary entries describing the entire trip, and even a receipt for a satchel bought from John Wanamaker.
Of particular connection to the APS, Beck in his entry on March 12th 1880 described a Friday evening he spent with Titian Ramsey Peale and his wife Lucy MacMullen Peale during which they had “a long chat about several ways of collection and preserving specimens.” Included in the entry are Beck’s sketches of Peale’s specimen boxes.
This entire volume is digitized and available to view here in our Digital Library.