Mary Baker Eddy Library facts for kids
The Mary Baker Eddy Library is a special place in Boston, Massachusetts. It's a library, a museum, and a home for important papers belonging to Mary Baker Eddy. She was the person who started a religion called Christian Science.
You can find the library on the Christian Science Center along Massachusetts Avenue. It's inside a part of an 11-story building that was first built for the Christian Science Publishing Society. The library keeps all of Mary Baker Eddy's letters and writings. It also has other cool exhibits, like the Mapparium. This is a huge, three-story globe made of stained glass that lets you stand right inside it to see the world as it looked in 1934!
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The Christian Science Publishing Society Building
The Publishing Society building is one of several buildings at the Christian Science Center. The whole Center was made bigger in the 1970s. The building itself was designed by Chester Lindsay Churchill, a local architect. It's made of strong limestone and granite.
This building used to hold all the publishing work for the Church. This included big printing presses and equipment to bind books. Look closely at the outside of the building! You'll see words carved into the stone like "Purity" and "Mercy" on one side, "Peace" and "Faith" on another, and "Hope" and "Love" on a third. There are also verses from the Bible carved there.
Explore the Mapparium: A Giant Glass Globe
The Mapparium is the most famous exhibit at the library. Imagine a giant, upside-down globe, three stories tall! It's made from 608 colorful stained-glass panels. Visitors can walk right through the middle of this globe on a glass bridge that is thirty feet long.
When you stand in the center of the bridge, you can see the entire globe without any of the usual distortions that maps often have. It's like seeing the world perfectly!
The Mapparium also has some amazing sound effects, which happened by accident! Because it's a round space made of glass, it creates unique echoes. If you stand in the very center of the globe, right under where the North Star would be, your voice sounds like it's all around you, almost like you're speaking into your own ears. Also, if you whisper from one end of the bridge, someone at the other end, 30 feet away, can hear you perfectly! This is called a "whispering gallery" effect.
The Mapparium was built in 1935, and most of its glass panels are still the originals. Only one panel has ever been replaced after it was damaged. When you visit, you might notice how different the world looked back then. For example, Africa is shown as many different colonies, and the USSR (Soviet Union) is shown as one big country. In 2002, special LED lights were added around the globe. These lights, along with music and words, help show how much the world has changed since 1935.
Special Collections and Exhibits
Historic Bible Collection
The Library has a very old and important collection of over 460 Bibles. Some of these are extremely rare! For example, it has a Coverdale Bible from 1535 and Tyndale’s New Testament from 1550. It also has first editions of other famous Bibles, like the Matthew’s Bible (1537), the Great Bible (1539), the Bishops’ Bible (1568), the Geneva Bible (1560), and the King James Bible (1611). You can see this amazing collection at the Library or even online.
Mary Baker Eddy's Papers Online
Since 2014, the Library has been putting its huge collection of Mary Baker Eddy's papers online. This includes her letters, sermons, early drafts of her writings, notes, and much more. You can explore these at mbepapers.org. The collection has over 28,000 letters that Mary Baker Eddy wrote during her life. It also has more than 35,000 letters that were sent to her!
Images for kids
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A friendly robot
