The oldest surviving European book that’s intact isn’t very large. In fact, the St. Cuthbert Gospel is almost small enough to fit in one’s palm. It’s price, however, is another thing. Yesterday it was announced that the British Library, in a deal brokered by Christie’s, has purchased the 7th century manuscript from the Society of Jesus for $14.4m.The book takes its name from the 7th century English Christian leader in whose coffin it was discovered in 1104. Still in its beautifully preserved red leather binding, the book appears exactly as it would have to a 7th century Anglo Saxon. The purchase was made with the aid of a $7.2m grant from Britain’s National Heritage Memorial Fund together with gifts from the Art Fund, Garfield Weston Foundation and the Foyle Foundation.
Christie’s Brokers $14.4m Sale of St. Cuthbert Gospel
April 18, 2012
Milton Berle’s Jokes Laugh To The Bank
May 8, 2013For $158,000 a bidder got Milton Berle’s library, including books and boxes of bound scripts and personal correspondence, but he didn’t get the comedian’s thousands of one-liners and jokes carefully catalogued over the decades. That file went for another $65,000 at Bonham’s Entertainment auction this week.
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Authors Annotate Books For Charity
May 6, 2013Why would a writer revisit a work completed years or decades ago? A host of Britain and Ireland’s brightest literary lights found sufficient cause in Second Thoughts, a charity auction that Sotheby’s will host later this month to benefit English PEN, which supports the rights of writers and readers around the world. Writers such as J.K. Rowling, Ian McEwan, Kasio Ishiguro, and Tom Stoppard have been induced to annotate first editions of their works with additional texts or illustrations. To avoid the appearance of rating the authors, Sotheby’s isn’t releasing estimates for the sale, which will be held on May 24 in London.
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Record $6m For Francis Crick’s DNA Letter
April 11, 2013A letter that Francis Crick wrote explaining his discovery with James Watson of DNA sold to an anonymous buyer for a record $6m yesterday at Christie’s in New York, soaring past its $1m estimate. It was the largest amount ever paid at auction for a letter, eclipsing the $3.4m fetched by an Abraham Lincoln letter in April 2008. Crick wrote the letter to his 12-year old son, who was in boarding school at the time.
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Rising Value of Unrestored Cars
By Malcolm Welford, Vintage Car Specialist
