"I love objects and the stories they tell," he says, and, after a pause, elaborates. "What they tell us about ourselves."
The office is up a brief flight of stairs from the library, with its portraits of somber Victorian academy notables.
And, behind two more locked doors, the archives, which he oversees. The academy has 17 million biologic specimens, but here its treasures include John Bartram's pocket watch, an embroidered buckskin jacket that Audubon wore on an 1843 expedition, and Ruth Patrick's pith helmet.
"Here's another interesting story," he says, all but jumping across a humidity-controlled room to a wooden globe from 1825, built in a misguided attempt to show that the Earth was hollow.
One of his four books - the 1990 Land of the Eagle: A Natural History of North America - was a companion to a BBC-PBS series with David Attenborough and was on the bestseller list in Britain for weeks.
Another former academy president, William Y. Brown, now at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, praised Peck's "commitment and passion for the arcane that few people have. He's definitely an important fixture of the firmament of everyone who cares about natural history, and among the many treasures of the Academy of Natural Sciences."
For now, Peck, whose current title is curator of art and artifacts and senior fellow, is planning a 2012 Harvard University exhibition of the natural history drawings of British poet Edward Lear.
But most of the books and papers in the extra office he has commandeered relate to his book chronicling the 200-year history of the academy for its bicentennial in 2012. He describes his immersion in the varied cast of characters - from Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe to Lewis and Clark - as "fascinating, fantastic stuff!"
Contact staff writer Sandy Bauers at 215-854-5147 or sbauers@phillynews.com.
Visit her blog at http://go.philly.com/greenspace
