Bargain hunter scores 700-year-old document | Hacker News Reader

Bargain hunter scores 700-year-old document

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71 pointsVigier40 comments

"The full missal was once owned by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher, before being sold in the 1940s and, much to the consternation of today’s academics, was divvied up into individual pages, she said."

Everything's for sale. :(

This horrible fate is unfortunately what awaits many old manuscripts sold in auctions to a specific sort of professional dealers. The dealers cut the manuscripts not only into individual sheets, but often cut out miniatures and illuminated initials and sell them individually to philistins. Loosing their original context this scraps are next to worthless for any future historians. It is in the same category as grave robbery, which also tremendously diminishes the scientific value of artifacts, even if they come to light later.

The least they could do is scan the originals, and donate them to archive.org.

Just think of how much value was added by divvying it up into individual pages if a single page is worth $10,000. /s

You may joke, but this is actually a very, very common issue collectors of historical documents face. Collectors of physical bond certificates also face this issue in the form of complete bonds being cut apart and the coupons being sold separately from the certificate itself. It's quite maddening, actually.

The sarcasm was that destroying a historical artefact "adds value", not that it is a common practice. Europeans literally used to cut up mummies and sell the fragments. But the only way it "adds value" is purely from the perspective of maximizing revenue, the same way scalpers "add value" by buying up products for cheap at the original price and then making a profit by charging more.

I share your sense that there's something horrible about this. But I don't think it's necessarily true that the only way it adds value is "from the perspective of maximizing revenue".

Suppose you've got a book with 200 pages and you can sell each page for $10k or the whole book for $1M. You get twice as much by selling individual pages and you are (hypothetically) a soulless money-grubbing philistine, so you slice it up and sell all the pages.

Has anything been gained, other than extra money for you? Yes! 200 people now have a beautiful historic artefact that they value having enough to want to pay $10k for it. In the scenario where you don't play Lizzie Borden on the book, one person has the whole thing. But evidently the satisfaction they get from having it isn't 200x the satisfaction those 200 people each get, because if it were they'd have been willing to pay you $2M instead of $1M.

Of course the paragraph above is the naive optimistic version. The cynical pessimistic version says that no one in the story actually cares about history or calligraphy or art or what have you, they just hope that in a few years someone else will be willing to pay more for the artefact they've got.

(Maybe the very fact that the individual pages are worth more than the book composed of them is an argument against the cynical pessimistic version: if all that's going on here is a lot of soulless money-grubbing philistines trying to maximize their profits, then the price of the book should be at least the price of all its pages, because someone who owns the book always has the option of slicing it up, so apparently something else is going on here. But I fear a sufficient explanation is that everyone is a soulless money-grubbing philistine and the market isn't functioning efficiently.)

[EDITED to add: Another bit of evidence that the relevant market, in this particular case and in the present day, isn't entirely composed of soulless money-grabbing philistine speculators: the story tells us that the person who bought it is not interested in selling it for $10k, because he loves having it, because it's beautiful and historic. Of course this doesn't tell us anything about whether when the book was sliced up for profit the market was entirely composed of s.m-g.p.s; maybe it was.]

I own a chunk of the Berlin Wall. If we had left it in one piece, imagine how much historical value it would have.

I'm not sure how many levels of irony, if any, you're employing there, so here are my actual not-ironic opinions:

If there were somewhere a museum large enough to contain it in one piece, that would actually have been pretty cool. Leaving it in one piece gumming up central Berlin, not so much. And of course there's some nice symbolism in the fact that it's all in bits.

Many levels of irony :) . Perhaps like the Great Wall it would have been better to run highways and tunnels through it but otherwise leave it intact[1]. There is in fact a gallery/museum with a large chunk of it, intact, including then-relevant murals painted just after the tearing down[2] - And that has immense cultural/historic value. It somewhat has the feel of a standard urban underpass, though. I don't think it's quite enough to capture the monstrosity of the wall.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badaling_Expressway [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Gallery

Interestingly, Egyptian mummies resulted from a process whereby the enbalmers would take apart the human body from the inside out and preserve the organs separately, so in a way, the Europeans were merely continuing the process of "parting them out".

As far as adding value, why not turn valuable works into NFTs by destroying them? https://culturacolectiva.com/art/frida-kahlo-artwork-burned-...

Why the sad face? Without the mechanism of sale the artifact would not be accessible to the person who appreciates it.

It's not a comment about the fact that the document itself can be bought and sold. It means that the physical integrity of the document is metaphorically "for sale". If damaging the document (by cutting it up) leads to more profit, then there are people who will choose profit over preservation.

That would probably reduce the total value, so there are some disincentives.

If it diminished the total value, then why did it happen? Other comments here seems to suggest it happens because it increases the total value.

Could be a difference in long-term vs short-term outlook. In the short term, cutting it up and selling it in pieces increases the number of potential buyers, which probably helps to fetch a higher price. But in the long term, you may be able to fetch a higher price by keeping it intact - especially if fully intact works become increasingly rare due to people cutting them up in pursuit of short term gains.

Yes, exactly. It’s only done to find a buyer quickly.

Nothing precluded the book being sold intact. That was at the moral discretion of the seller.

Fuck "mechanism of sale". You can't see the value of preserving the full, priceless manuscript in its original form?

This is not a question of biblioclasm but that an important factor in stewardship of artifacts is transfer between custodians. Instead of someone binning that artifact they offered it for sale. This allowed someone who saw its value to become its steward.

All things have tradeoffs. It is a tragedy to some degree that the missal was deconstructed. However, the counterfactual is not known--held in one piece, it might have all been destroyed in fire, or lost forever. As it stands, it was distributed, shared and appreciated by many.

Incidentally, this appears to be a portion of a premodern musical score. You wouldn't be able to just sit down and play it as if it were a modern score, because the scales started at a different place way back when, but it could certainly be transcribed to modern notation and would be playable/singable then.

Nope! Lots of pro singers (including me) can read this as-is. No need to transcribe to modern notation. This chant notation is still very commonly used and read today by all kinds of professionals.

Well, then, I (happily!) stand corrected. Still, this notation would not be immediately playable to an instrumentalist who had never specifically studied medieval music, and that is probably most of them.

It's amazing a notation standard has lasted over 800 years. Does it have a name? I'd love to read about it further.

The page purchased by Sideri is of particular interest to scholars.
It’s a treasure both because of its age and condition, which is far better than the other page in the Colby collection, said Megan Cook, Sideri’s former professor, who teaches medieval literature at Colby.

The parchment is worth upward of $10,000, according to Davis. But Sideri said he has no intention of selling it. ... “This is something at the end of the day that I know is cool,” he said. “I didn’t buy this expecting to sell it.”

Ah, he's already positioning with "No lowballers, I know what I've got."

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

For those curious: it was from an estate sale in Maine, and the estimated value is $10k.

I'm guessing the above is a "too long, didn't read"?

In the article

> A bargain hunter who went to an estate sale in Maine

> An expert on manuscripts said the document, first reported by the Maine Monitor, could be worth as much as $10,000.

Oh that happened to me recently. So I actually talk to both beggars and cops, which nobody does, everybody takes advice from civil rights lawyers and the gangsters they give impunity, which agree that you should never talk to police. Same advice. Coincidence. Both treat both homeless and cops like shit. Coincidence.

Anyway so I'm talking to him, and he shows me some big huge format documents, like 30 inches by 40 inches, inches not centimeters, and I look, holy shit, somebody forgot to use the incinerator, military intelligence on the street. Literally on the street, laying there on the concrete, getting dirty, maps made in England with analog mapmaking, Crown Copyright from the 70's and 80's, of the coastline of Argentina, complete with information of reefs which eg an aircraft carrier could collide with. It was obvious that was the intention. Dude obviously threatened to nuke Buenos Aires.

Notably Banco Inglés, with a tilde and everything, we're talking high production values, the absolute highest, English Admiralty, Superpower internal information. As an native English speaker, I would translate that bank's name to English as Fuck You Sandbank, which protected Buenos Aires once precisely from the same Royal Navy. The depth is 0.7 meters, according to the map I had, and they map uses analog measurements from English satellites, analog photography. So point being somebody forgot to burn them, there's leaks, they're sloppy, they got to a spy, the spy moved to Santiago, the spy gave up on his conspiracy theories and gave them to a beggar, beggar had no idea what they were worth, I bought them for $20, a complete collection, like it says this part to the South is in map 3134, sure enough I also had map 3134, it's everything. Especially the Falklands. Even shows the kelp forests.

Military intelligence. No pixels no matter how close you zoom in. All hand made.

This comment made my day. You are not alone in talking to beggars and cops, they’re the most interesting strangers to speak with. I hope you don’t catch flak for putting it so dramatically, I really enjoyed it, and especially the story that followed.

Super cool item to own. Like you’re living in an RPG.

That's exactly what it's like, like I'm living in an RPG. Attack damage carry. I do get a lot of flak. Unscathed. The word is videoludic, video like video, ludic like ludum meaning game in Latin, my life is videoludic.

Sounds like you have a standard nautical chart (although when I check 3134 is Islas Canarias to Nouakchott). Now you need the yacht :)

Nah any chart has the depth for a yatch. This had depths for nuclear deterrence.