The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 27, July 3, 2005, Article 13

BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE LOOTED

Tom Fort, Editor of our print journal The Asylum, sends the
following story from The Independent, published June 28,
2005:

"More than 30,000 books, including 1,000 rare and priceless
items, are believed to have been stolen from the French national
library in Paris.

So chaotic are the library's cataloguing and security systems
it is impossible to know when books were stolen. Some may
have been "lost" in an institution that houses 35 million objects.
But a year-long investigation by the president of the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France (BNF) found the library had been
systematically pillaged over many years."

"Many of these are relatively valueless copies of 19th- and 20th-
century works of literature or history. The BNF, like the British
Library in London, is given a copy of every book published in
France.

More disturbingly, 1,183 priceless books or documents from
the library's "precious core" cannot be traced. More than 200
of these are medieval manuscripts or books from the dawn of
the age of printing."

"In 1996, the library moved to a new home, the Bibliothèque
François Mitterrand, beside the Seine in eastern Paris. Security
is now said to have been greatly tightened. But many ancient
texts and manuscripts are still stored in the original building in
central Paris."

Full Story

Tom adds: "There is at least one highly important numismatic
item among the missing material: The best preserved seal of the
English ruler Edward the Confessor (1042-1066). It was
attached to a writ granting an estate in England to the church
of St. Denis in Paris. The strip of parchment connecting the two
items disintegrated sometime before 1850. The last published
photo of the seal (and the writ, which is not missing) can be
found in T.A.M. Bishop and P. Chaplais, Facsimilies of English
Royal Writs to AD 1100 (Oxford, 1957), pl. XVIII. This 11th
century wax seal, which uses the same image that appears on
the obverse on the king's Sovereign/Eagles type, went missing
sometime in the late 1960s/early 1970s. One can only hope
that the box containing it was simply misplaced in the massive
BN collection."

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

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