Oldest private book goes for £3m at UK auction

LONDON:

The world’s oldest book in a private collection, and one of the oldest in existence, sold at auction in London on Tuesday for more than £3m.

The Crosby-Schoyen Codex was previously owned by Norwegian businessman and rare book collector Martin Schoyen and contains the oldest complete copies of two texts from the Bible — the book of Jonah and the first letter of Peter.

Bidding for the text at Christie’s auction house started at £1.7m for a mix of enthusiastic online and in-person bidders.

Sold for £3,065,000 ($3,898,000) including tax to an anonymous bidder.

The code was discovered by Egyptian farmers in the 1950s.

It was originally copied by a monk in what is now Egypt around the fourth century AD, making it at least 1,600 years old and much older than more famous ancient texts such as the Gutenberg Bible, which dates to the 1450s.

Written in Coptic script on double-sided papyrus sheets now preserved between Plexiglas plates, the ancient biblical text represents the advancement of written technology at a time when single-sided scrolls were more common.

Twelve additional selected pieces from the Schoyen collection were also auctioned alongside the literary gem.

The entire collection includes over 20,000 pieces, spanning 5,000 years of history from 3,500 BC. until today, according to its website.

Although impressive, the sale is far from the highest sale price for a rare text.

Last year, the Codex Sassoon — a Jewish Bible more than 1,000 years old — sold for $38.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York in a new record.

That surpassed the $30.8 million Microsoft founder Bill Gates paid in 1994 for Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester manuscript.

The most expensive historical document remains one of the first printed copies of the US Constitution, which Sotheby’s sold for $43 million in November 2021.