Antiques Dealer Sentenced for Possession of Stolen Shakespeare Folio
Source: Art Loss Register - Excellent worldwide service to recover stolen items, register collections or research that potential buy that sounds a bit too good to be true.
Antiques dealer Raymond Scott received sentences totalling eight years after being found guilty of handling a stolen copy of Shakespeare's First Folio and removing the stolen document from Britain.
The rare 17th century compendium of Shakespeare plays was stolen in December 1998 from Durham University. The document was recognized in June 2009 by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. when Scott offered the work for sale. Suspicious staff quickly contacted local law enforcement, the British Council and the FBI. Though Scott was found innocent of the theft, evidence suggests he was responsible for or had been party to the removal of several parts of the folio in a bid to "hide its true identity". The damage sustained, described by Judge Richard Lowden as an act of "cultural vandalization," is believed to have reduced the value of the folio by approximately £1.5m.
In an interview with the BBC World Service, Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register, stated "Persistent criminals like Scott deserve eight year sentences for irreparable damage to national heritage."
Voynich Manuscript, The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World
Source: socyberty.com
AT THE BEINECKE RARE BOOK and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, hardly a day passes without an inquiry about a small volume known as the Voynich Manuscript.
The Beinecke contains countless rare books. What makes the Voynich Manuscript of particular interest is that no one has yet been able to read it in full; the text is written in a code that some of the world’s greatest cryptographers and linguistics experts have failed to decipher.
The manuscript measures 53/4 by 81/2 inches and is some 200 pages long. Its vellum leaves are covered with extraordinary flowing writing – extraordinary because its author has used a completely unknown alphabet. The illustrations accompanying the text are equally odd – they seem to represent plants, women, and astronomical configurations. Since neither the words nor pictures are easy to interpret, the book has been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world.
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