HistoryofScience.com Blog

Honestly I was always rather turned-off by the what I used to think was the quaint Victorian pre-occupation with collecting locks of hair of celebrities. It always seemed to me more the kind of thing that a mom would save in her baby album. That was till I read the article in today's The New York Times entitled A Little off the Top for History. It is available at the link above. Seems there are still a lot of people collecting hair. And with the possibility of DNA analysis from hair strands maybe something new can actually be learned about the personalities from their hair. The article mentions the legal issue of collecting the hair of living people, and one has to emphasize that an intact provenance is essential for authentically attributing the hair to the historical personality involved. Otherwise you just have plain old hair.
As fascinating as hair-collecting may be to some, I will stick to rare books, autographs & manuscripts, prints, and the occasional painting, drawing, or medical or scientific instrument.

In one of the most remarkable art-historical developments ever, a previously unknown painting has been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci:

"The painting, a nuptial portrait of a young woman in profile, dates from Leonardo's first Lombard period, ca.1485. The finding is one of the most amazing recent examples of intuition, detective work, technical innovation and connoisseurship. An American collector discovered the masterpiece in a private Swiss collection. The portrait, actually a mixed-media of white, red and black chalks with additions of watercolor, is executed on vellum and measures approximately 24X33 centimeters. Originally purchased in a New York auction 10 years ago, the painting was catalogued as "German early 19th century," and sold for $20,000. This is the first known Da Vinci work executed on vellum, a factor that probably led experts to believe that it was painted by a 19th century German "Nazarene" artist. Moreover, the portrait appears to have been somewhat painted over in the 19th century during a very sensitive restoration. The first to have fully understood the importance of this work was Dr. Nicholas Turner, former Curator of Drawings for the British and Getty Museums. The attribution has been subsequently confirmed by a number of experts, including Dr. Mina Gregori and Dr. Cristina Geddo. The owner is a private Swiss collector who was "overwhelmed" when told of the true attribution. Allesandro Vezzosi, Director of Italy's Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci will feature the work in his new monograph on the artist "Leonardo Infinito" to be published July 5th. Lumiere Technology, a Paris based institute under the guidance of inventor Pascal Cotte and Jean Penicaut confirmed the portrait's attribution and performed the technical analysis. " (artdaily.org, July 6, 2008)

Confirming that there is a disconnect between elements of the rare book market and the overall economy, the library of rare scientific books assembled by our former client, Richard Green, auctioned on June 17, met expectations by achieving a sales total of $11,019,687 including buyer's premium. New price levels were reached for the majority of items in the sale. Notable, but expected high prices included $2,210,500 for the first edition of Copernicus' De revolutionibus (1543), $194,500 for the first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), $506,500 for the first edition of Galileo's Le operazioni del compasso geometrico, et militare. (1606). There were also numerous unexpectedly high prices realized, including: $170,500 for the offprint of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage's translation of Menabrea's paper describing the theoretical operations of Babbage's never-realized Analytical Engine (1843), $170,500 for the earliest available telephone directory published in New Haven, 1878, $182,500 for the three separate issues of Turing's On Computable Numbers (1936-37). These prices included the buyer's premium.