One of the oldest surviving hand-lettered gospels, the Eikosiphoinissa Manuscript 220, is being returned to the Greek monastery it was pilfered from during the first World War. The manuscript was looted in 1917 by Bulgarian soldiers.
Pavel and I decided to try a different format. In this podcast series, we are not inviting any guests and just talk about some bookish topics. This time Pavel went to the Russian State Library to see some worm-eaten books.
For quite a long time writing materials were a very expensive thing. It is not surprising that Mediaeval scholars were looking for some ways to cut the costs or recycle the materials. That’s how palimpsests were introduced. Often the old not-so-important texts were scraped or washed off from the leather (or papyrus) pages to allow for the new texts to be written over. This time the unimportant text of the medical recipe book attributed to Hippocrates was replaced by a layer of Bible text known as the “Sinaitic manuscript”.
The manuscript of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was bound in crimson morocco after it was returned by printer. One of the peculiarities of that binding was that each page was silked.
