Parkway Central Library

This guide to Parkway Central Library in Philadelphia opens on a dissecting table in London, where an anatomist examines a dead raven belonging to a young novelist named Charles Dickens. Grip ran wild through Dickens's household for years, biting ankles and barking out one phrase, before collapsing suddenly on a March afternoon in 1841, convinced by her owner to have been poisoned. You'll hear how Dickens had her stuffed and mounted above his desk, wrote her into his novel Barnaby Rudge, and how that novel crossed paths with a rising American writer a year later. Climb to the third floor and you can still find her, feathers a little duller than the day she died.