5 ms·

"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 ac

• hnbad 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    You may joke, but this is actually a very, very common issue collectors of historical documents face.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 4y ago
      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.
      • Eleison23 4y ago
        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-nft/ https://culturacolectiva.com/art/frida-kahlo-artwork-burned-...
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • gjm11 4y ago
        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.]
        • GauntletWizard 4y ago
          I own a chunk of the Berlin Wall. If we had left it in one piece, imagine how much historical value it would have.
          • 4y ago
• adolph 4y ago
  Why the sad face? Without the mechanism of sale the artifact would not be accessible to the person who appreciates it.
  • adrianmonk 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      That would probably reduce the total value, so there are some disincentives.
      • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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 4y ago
            Yes, exactly. It’s only done to find a buyer quickly.
  • Bud 4y ago
• Archelaos 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    The least they could do is scan the originals, and donate them to archive.org.