One of oldest books seen selling for $3.8M

One of the oldest books ever written is expected to sell for up to $3.8 million when it goes up for auction in London in June.

Auction house Christie’s made the prediction on the so-called Crosby-Schoyen Codex, a stitched papyrus written with Coptic text that is believed to be two books of the Bible.

A scribe wrote the 52-leaves containing the first epistle of Peter and the Book of Jonah at an Egyptian monastery for a period of 40 years or 250 to 350 AD, according to Reuters.

Eugenio Donadoni, Christie’s Senior Specialist, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, says dry climate helped preserve the book like other Christian manuscripts written in Egypt.

According to the report, the Codex was discovered in Egypt in the 1950s and acquired by the University of Mississippi until 1981. It passed to Norwegian manuscript collector Dr. Martin Schoyen acquired it in 1988 and is now auctioning it off.

Meanwhile, Harvard University said it has removed human skin from the binding of a 19th century book about the afterlife that has been in its collections at Houghton Library since the 1930s, Associated Press reports.

The book “Des Destinees de L’ame” (“Destinies of the Soul”) written by French novelist and poet Arsene Houssaye in the early 1880s was given to Ludovic Bouland, a physician, who bound the book with skin he took without consent from the body of a deceased female patient in a hospital where he worked as he deemed the “book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” Harvard said in a recent statement, according to AP.

Scientific analysis done in 2014 confirmed the binding was made of human skin, AP quoted the university as saying.