A Very Rare Book
8th September 2014
This is a fascinating tour of the ‘forensics’ of determining the authenticity of very old books.
Wilding obtained digital samples of unquestionably legitimate stamps from the book collection of Federico Cesi, the Accademia dei Lincei founder, and compared them in high-resolution detail. In each stamp, a lynx appeared at the center, framed by two oval borders, a wrap of Latin text (“From the Library of Federico Cesi, Prince and Marquis of Monticelli”), and a third oval border. Wilding then examined the stamp in Lan’s “Sidereus Nuncius.” In the genuine stamps, there was a gap in the innermost oval border just to the left of the lynx’s mouth. In Lan’s copy, the border was continuous. Wilding also checked the inventory of Cesi’s library, and found no listing of a “Sidereus Nuncius.”