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Corrections, Feedback, and other Items of Interest
Correction: In “What a Million Dollars Buys You,” published in Fine Books’ October compendium, we incorrectly reported that the Marco Polo manuscript sold late last year for 1.4 million was auctioned at Christie’s. That manuscript was actually auctioned by Sotheby’s. We regret this error. The emended text is below.
Marco Polo Manuscript
Sotheby’s London, December 3, 2008
Estimate: $300,000-$450,000 (£200,000-£300,000)
One of the year’s more expensive medieval manuscripts of European origin was the so-called Courtenay Compendium, a late fourteenth-century collection of tracts that included a number of items on Near and Far Eastern history. The most significant of these was the only substantial manuscript account of Marco Polo’s travels to have come to auction for some eighty years. The book wasn’t written by the adventurer himself—it was a manuscript copy made by a scribe before the invention of the printing press. The Swiss-based manuscript dealer, Dr. Jörn Günther, bought the book.