[HN Gopher] Bargain hunter scores 700-year-old document
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Bargain hunter scores 700-year-old document
Author : Vigier
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-09-28 04:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| kleiba wrote:
| Wow, both 700 years old and medieval! How lucky!
| sophacles wrote:
| There are parts of the world that aren't European... many of
| them existed 700 years ago too, and were populated by people
| who had unlocked writing.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| rare combo indeed
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've gotten unmedieval on its ass.
| kleiba wrote:
| Dang, now my comment's no longer funny... but then again:
| maybe it never was :-)
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| 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.
| Bud wrote:
| 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.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| 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.
| throw7 wrote:
| "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. :(
| adolph wrote:
| Why the sad face? Without the mechanism of sale the artifact
| would not be accessible to the person who appreciates it.
| Bud wrote:
| Fuck "mechanism of sale". You can't see the value of
| preserving the full, priceless manuscript in its original
| form?
| [deleted]
| adrianmonk wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| That would probably reduce the total value, so there are
| some disincentives.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| freetime2 wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| Yes, exactly. It's only done to find a buyer quickly.
| Archelaos wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The least they could do is scan the originals, and donate
| them to archive.org.
| hnbad wrote:
| Just think of how much value was added by divvying it up into
| individual pages if a single page is worth $10,000. /s
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| 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.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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.
| gjm11 wrote:
| 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.]
| Eleison23 wrote:
| 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-...
| [deleted]
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| For those curious: it was from an estate sale in Maine, and the
| estimated value is $10k.
| neogodless wrote:
| 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.
| ourmandave wrote:
| _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."
| ProAm wrote:
| Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| 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 Ingles, 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.
| notch656a wrote:
| Sounds like you have a standard nautical chart (although when I
| check 3134 is Islas Canarias to Nouakchott). Now you need the
| yacht :)
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Nah any chart has the depth for a yatch. This had depths for
| nuclear deterrence.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| 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.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2022-09-29 23:01 UTC)