The unfortunate incident

Well, things do happen in libraries that, you know, we perhaps wish hadn't.

And I remember when I first started work at the library and began working with, um, the original materials collections, um, and I heard about the Holtermann Collection, which is internationally significant, a very large collection of glass plate negatives, wet plate glass negatives.

Now, I will go on to explain in really quite exhausting detail what exactly a wet plate glass negative is.

But for now, just run your mind through what could possibly go wrong with a one meter by one and a half meter sheet of glass, and you'll begin to imagine the situation that the library found itself in.

And I would hear the story of, "Oh, yes, but then there's the one that got broken."

Shattered.

Slid down the wall and smashed.

200 pieces of broken glass.

Tiny little shards and glass dust just lying-

Oh, God

... on the floor.

Uh, I would die.

And yet, somehow, this dreadful event that is any librarian's worst nightmare also shows that even the remnants of a disaster have value if you hold onto them long enough.

Now, we will get to the horrifying specifics of the disaster in question, but first let's go back to understand what it was that actually broke.

It all started with a man named Bernhard Holtermann.

He found the biggest reef gold specimen that had ever been found, uh, in Australia.

It was 286 kilos.

Once the nugget was found, he commissioned the photographer to actually take a photograph of him-

Mm-hmm

... with the nugget before it was crushed.

So it was his, like, his height.

And our friend and curator, Margo Riley, who told us this story, uh, she tactfully points out that Holtermann, well, he was pretty stoked to be standing next to a very big thing.

He wasn't a particularly tall man.

[laughs]

[laughs] So I'd say size had a lot to do with it.