Raymond Scott

Unemployed book dealer Raymond Scott has been convicted of “handling stolen goods in the extraordinary case of a ‘priceless’ Shakespeare First Folio which went missing from a locked cabinet in Durham University’s Pallas Green Museum in a 1998 raid,” according to a report in the Daily Telegraph.

As reported earlier on MobyLives (here and here), in 2001 Scott had appeared at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC with the folio, claiming that he had discovered it in Cuba and wanting to know if it were genuine. The Folger staff immediately recognized the folio, though it had been badly mutilated—with the cover removed and pages torn out to obscure its identity—and called the FBI.

“Scott, who had mysteriously been able to afford a high-rolling lifestyle despite living off benefits alone, was subsequently arrested for theft, handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from the UK,” according to the Telegraph’s report.

Scott appeared at his hearing in a silver strech limo, complete with chilled champagne, and has painted himself as a high living, successful antiquarian book dealer, with homes in Monte Carlo and Liechtenstein, and a Cuban dancer girlfriend. “But in reality Scott was a small-time crook who lived with his widowed mother Hannah in a former council house in Tyne and Wear, his life hemmed in by credit card debts topping £90,000,” according to the Telegraph.

Scott was cleared of the charge of theft at Newcastle Crown Court but was found guilty of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from the United Kingdom. Not yet sentence, Judge Richard Lowden nonetheless warned Scott that he faced a “substantial custodial sentence.” Following conviction, police revealed something they couldn’t during the trial: Scott had a string of 24 previous convictions dating back 32 years,” according to the Telegraph.

Or, as a Telegraph sidebar put it, Scott “is a middle-aged thief, with a string of convictions going back more than 20 years,” who has “never worked in his life, and though he has managed to rack up £90,000 of debt on his credit cards, his only income was state benefits.” When first approached by police about the folio theft, “Scott told officers: ‘I’m an alcoholic and need two bottles of top-of-the-range champagne every day, but only after 6pm. I hope you have some in the police station.”’

The folio, meanwhile, has been returned to Durham University.

Raymond Scott and friend

Raymond Scott, rare book dealer from Tyne and Wear, England, has pleaded not guilty to the theft and handling and transporting stolen goods, telling the police that was being framed by corrupt university staff, according to the latest report from the Independent.

As the newspaper recounts,

Scott was arrested after he handed staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, asking for it to be authenticated. The 53-year-old claimed to have discovered the stolen artefact in Cuba.

But staff at the world-renowned library recognised the folio as a unique first edition taken a decade earlier from Durham University’s library on Palace Green, and called in the British Embassy, Durham Police and the FBI.

Each copy of the folio, printed in 1623, was unique and could be identified by its dimensions and by characteristic marks and printing errors, a trial at Newcastle Crown Court heard.

Mobylives has been following the case of the theft (see here and here). Scott, a flamboyant character, who arrived at his hearing in a silver limousine, sporting a Panama hat and flashing victory signs at reporters, has told the court that experts desperate to recover the stolen Folio had conspired against him.

According to the Independent, “A jury heard how he told Durham Police detectives: ‘I am not saying that the experts are lying or that they are being deceptive but it rather looks as if their brief has been to compare the Cuban copy with known records of the Durham copy and look for similarities. It is all a very cosy world. It is sort of like a conspiracy; they are ganging up against me.’”

He also told the court,

“‘Do you seriously think I’m going to walk into the foremost Shakespeare library in the world and using my own name and address, with my fingerprints all over it, hand them a copy knowing and believing that it’s got a doubtful provenance? A book worth millions — that I’m going to walk into such a place with such a book and ask to see the head librarian?

There is no way if I had any knowledge that this was the Durham folio or a stolen copy that I would walk into the Folger Library, show the book to the head librarian and then leave all my bank details, my own name and address and show them my British passport.’”

Hmmmm…. does sound kind of foolish when you put it that way…. But the prosecution alleges that Scott stole the folio from a secured glass cabinet at an exhibition of ancient English literature at Durham University’s Palace Green Library in 1998, and was planning to cut it up and sell it off piecemeal on the open market to pay off his debts related to his long standing affair with a Cuban woman.

The trial continues.

Raymond Scott arrives at court where he is being tried for theft, handling stolen goods and removing criminal property.

Things aren’t looking good for Raymond Scott, 53, of Wingate, County Durham, accused of stealing a rare Shakespeare folio from Durham University in 1998. As reported earlier here on MobyLives, Scott is currently standing trial in northeastern England at Newcastle Crown Court for the theft of the folio. He was arrested in 2009 after taking the volume to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, were he went asking for a verification of authenticity, claiming that he had found the folio at a friend’s house in Cuba.

According to this report by the BBC, the attorney for the prosecution, Robert Smith, told the court that Scott had “‘told staff at the Folger Library he was staying at the Mayflower hotel in Washington DC, where he had a suite. The truth was he lived at a house on Wigeon Close, Washington, not DC but Tyne and Wear, with his mother.’”"

“The prosecution said that Mr Scott had become infatuated with a young Cuban waitress and was sending her money,” the BBC report continued, “Mr. Smith said, ‘He had been transferring to her substantial amounts of money which he could ill afford and which he had borrowed for that purpose. He is not a wealthy man by any means. On the contrary, he was living on state benefits. He had credit card debts and bank liabilities of more than £90,000.’”

Shakespeare First Folio

The prosecutor told the court that Scott had removed the front and back cover, frontispiece, final page and binding to hide its provenance. And that after it was verified as genuine, he intended to sell it on the open market.

Rare book experts described the condition of the folio as “‘damaged, brutalised and mutilated,’” according to the BBC report, but they “were able to tell that it was the Durham folio by its dimensions and by a handwritten note, referring to the play Troilus And Cressida.

The folio is one of the most important works in the English language, and is valued between £3m and £15m.

A Houston Chronicle story reports that the National Cathedral in Washington, DC may have to sell off their rare book collection to raise much needed cash: “Facing a reduced budget and a third round of layoffs, officials at Washington National Cathedral are considering disposing of priceless treasures — including a trove of rare books — that are no longer considered part of its central mission.”

Though the Cathedral began acquiring books back in 1964, it is currently reorienting itself as an Episcopal congregation, tourist landmark and promoter of interfaith dialogue. Kathleen Cox, the Cathedral’s chief operating officer, tells the Chronicle that the collection can no longer be considered a “core function” in the current economic climate.

Thus, the Cathedral is said to be in talks with Washington’s Folger Shakespeare Library. Cox tells the paper “discussions are ‘preliminary,’ and it would be ‘premature’ to say if items would be sold or loaned. ‘What would be an ideal situation is to find … through a partnership someone that might take on the responsibility of conserving and maintaining the books and then having them accessible to the public in some way,’ she said.”

The Folger library and the Cathedral have worked together in the past, with Folger’s conservators advising the Cathedral on issues such as conservation.

The possibility of selling off some of the collection, valued in the millions, comes at a time when the Cathedral faces has reduced staff from 170 to 70 employees, and are looking for more way to conserve money. However, according to the Chronicle’s report, “Some tomes in the cathedral’s 8,000-volume rare-books collection will definitely stay, Cox said, including the Prince Henry Bible, a first edition of the King James Bible printed in London in 1611 that belonged to Henry, the prince of Wales and the king’s eldest son.”

On this day in 1048 the great Persian poet Omar Khayyam was born in Nayshapur, Iran. A brilliant polymath, Khayyam was a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician and poet. Most renown during his lifetime as a mathematician, Khayyam wrote the influential Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070), which, according to this Wikipedia entry, “laid down the principles of algebra, part of the body of Persian Mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe. In particular, he derived general methods for solving cubic equations and even some higher orders.”

But Omar Khayyam is now most widely known in the English-speaking world as a poet and the author of The Rubaiyat, a long poem comprised of one thousand quatrains — four line verses, or rubais. There is a wonderful compendium of the various translations on the Electronic Literature Foundation’s website, which includes the most famous among the translations, by English Victorian poet and translator Edward Fitzgerald. It is Fitzgerald who we have to thank for the quatrain:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow.

This article in the Boston Globe reports that, “a team of scholars at Germany’s Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences will complete the first phase of what will ultimately be an unprecedented, two-decade effort to throw light on the origins of the Koran.”

The international project, called the Corpus Coranicum, uses the internet to create “something that scholars of the Koran have long yearned for: a central repository of imagery, information, and analysis about the Muslim holy book,” according to the Globe. “Modern research into Islam’s origin and early years has been hampered by the paucity and inaccessibility of ancient texts, and the reluctance of Muslim governments in places like Yemen to allow wide access to them.”

But now, this project, which draws on some of the earliest Korans known, in Istanbul, Cairo, Paris, and Morocco, allows “users to study for themselves images of thousands of pages of early Korans, texts that differ in small but potentially telling ways from the modern standard version. The project will also link passages in the text to analogous ones in the New Testament and Hebrew Bible, and offer an exhaustive critical,” says the Globe.

According to the project’s scholars, it will be the world’s first “critical edition” of the Koran, a resource that gathers historical evidence and scholarly literature into one searchable, cross-referenced whole. And, because it is web-based, it will accessible to the world.

This last point seems to have stirred up the beginnings of controversy in parts of the Muslim world where the text is taken to be God’s exact dictation to the Angel Gabriel. To say that the text has historic roots, has existed through time, with permutations, is to many considered slanderous. And, as the Globe reports, “Already, the creators of the Corpus Coranicum, in response to press coverage in Germany, have felt the need to publicly insist on al-Jazeera and in visits to Muslim countries that they have no intention of undermining the faith.”

According to the Globe, “No mainstream Koranic scholars see the Corpus Coranicum, or work like it, triggering a Muslim Reformation. So far, the debates over the roots of the Koran have remained within academia, and most scholars don’t see that changing. ‘Most Muslims simply don’t care about this sort of work, any more than most Christians care about the Dead Sea Scrolls,’ says Walid Saleh, an Islamic scholar at the University of Toronto specializing in the history of Koranic interpretation. ‘This is a Western academic enterprise, this critical historical study.’”

Scientists in England have discovered a way to “measure the degradation of old books and historical documents” based on how they smell. According to this report from The Telegraph, they believe “their non-destructive ’sniff’ test could help libraries and museums preserve a range of prized objects, some of which are degrading rapidly due to advancing age.”

The two books returned to Germany by Robert Thomas

Bookslut points us to a dramatic story about a 18-year-old American soldier during World War II, “fresh from the horrors of combat,” who, somewhere in Germany, “blundered into one of the notorious salt mines where the Germans stashed their national treasures. And this one contained books. Millions and millions of books from institutions across Germany.”

According to this Los Angeles Times story by Michael E. Ruane, the young soldier, Robert Thomas, did perhaps the expected thing: he took two of the books as souvenirs. What Thomas didn’t know: the books were priceless “16th century volumes date to the dawn of the Protestant Reformation when Germany was the book publishing center of the world.” For 64 years, Thomas kept the books in “two old cardboard boxes — one of which had long ago contained shaving lotion.” As it turned out, keeping them in a cool, dry, dark place wasn’t so bad for them.

But now, Thomas is returning them, with a little help from the National Archives, which has helped trace the books: one “to a museum in Paderborn, Germany,” and the other “to a library in Bonn.”

“He probably had no idea that this was valuable,” says German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth. “He just thought it was a souvenir. . . . You do that in youthful spirit. I think it’s great that he thought about it a second time and came to the conclusion that these books belonged to someone.”

Coolest twist of the story: The books were probably hidden not by looting Nazis but by “anti-Nazi librarians hiding their books.”

Meanwhile, asked why he would pick up books, of all things, as his war souvenirs, “Thomas said: As a kid in high school, he had loved to spend time in the Long Beach Public Library.”

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The (UK) Guardian reports that the British Library bought a 16th-century British manuscript that was sought by a US buyer. After mounting a public appeal to keep the book in the UK, the library “finally bought it with help from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and the Art Fund charity,” according to the Guardian, for £600,000.

The book is described as “A unique alphabet book, offering a selection of spectacular and bizarre fonts to the luxury medieval manuscript illuminator stuck for inspiration.” The Guardian goes on to describe the text: “The 46 leaves of parchment may have been a demonstration of a luxury book workshop’s skill, ready to show off to a potential customer, or a complete pattern manual for a craftsman to copy. It contains gold embellished borders, title pages, and 14 alphabets wreathed in flowers and foliage, made up of humans or serpents, fish, dragons and other animal figures.”

The Guardian spoke with Kathleen Doyle, curator of illuminated manuscripts at the library, who described the acquisition as “tremendously exciting”. The book sheds light on how illuminated manuscripts where produced. “It is the most complete set of designs for manuscript decoration known to have survived from late-medieval Britain.”

The book languished for centuries in Earl of Macclesfield’s library—a 15th-century text concealed within an 18th-century binding. Now it will be available for all to see in the British Library’s treasures gallery as of this Friday. And you can get an advance glimpse of some of the amazingly beautiful images here.

Codex Sinaiticus, "Look Inside the Book" 4th Century style.

An Associated Press wire story reports that “The surviving pages of the world’s oldest Christian Bible have been reunited — digitally. The early work known as the Codex Sinaiticus has been housed in four separate locations across the world for more than 150 years. But starting Monday, it became available for perusal on the Web.”

Now scholars, and others, including, well, you, can see it all, digitally, on the Codex Sinaiticus website. As the site modestly proclaims, “Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world.”

About the book itself, the AP continues, “As it survives today, Codex Sinaiticus comprises just over 400 large leaves of prepared animal skin, each of which measures 15 inches by 13.5 inches. It is the oldest book that contains a complete New Testament and is only missing parts of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. The 4th-century book, written in Greek, has been digitally reunited in a project involving groups from Britain, Germany, Russia and Egypt, which each possessed parts of the 1,600-year-old manuscript.”

The AP quotes Scott McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library as saying it “offers a window into the development of early Christianity and firsthand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation.” And, McKendrick goes on to say, the Codex is also “a landmark in the history of the book, as it is arguably the oldest large-bound book to have survived.”

According to the Codex’s website, “The four principal partners in the Codex Sinaiticus Project are the institutions which hold parts of the manuscript: The British Library, Leipzig University Library, St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, and the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg.”

Codex Sinaiticus name means “book from the Sinai”, and was originally found in the Greek Orthodox St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in the Sinai desert. How it came to be in four different locations is part of the research the Codex Sinaiticus Project is currently undertaking.