In one of my weekend trips to Philadelphia, I went to the Parkway Central Library to visit Grip. If you are a reader of Charles Dickens or Edgar Allan Poe you may know a thing or two about him. In 1941, Charles Dickens published the novel Barnaby Rudge, which had been serialized in the same year in his own weekly periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock. As a companion to the title character, Dickens added a large and talkative raven called Grip. His idea, expressed in a letter to a friend, was to make the bird “immeasurably more knowing” than the protagonist.