misslj_author | My $100US Book Buy. (Reply)

There was an interesting discussion going on on the DSP Twitter (@dreamspinners) this morning, about what's the most amount you've spent on books. Now, I've spent a lot of money on books over the years, and bought loads of books, but there's one book in my collection that is the most expensive book I've ever bought.

This book is The Maciejowski Bible, and it's an out of print rare book. It's a book of illuminated manuscripts and is like the Holy Grail for medieval reenactors. When I bought my copy, it was 1998, and money wasn't as tight as it is these days, which is why I didn't really have much issue with forking out $100US for a book.

Yup. $100 US. For one book. Not including postage. At the time, our dollar was pretty crap, too, so it was around $180AU including postage by the time I was done.

Scenes from the Life of King David.

There were only three copies in the country at the time, too, and they were owned by medieval living history reenactors (we used metal weapons with blunted edges in our combat, so the real deal. Except for being blunt.) and they weren't likely to let us down here in SA borrow their book. I don't blame them, either. The SA Reference Library didn't have a copy of it, so I decided, what the hell, I'm a living history person, I'll buy myself a copy of the book.

So I did. And I don't regret it.

I remember when it arrived, I was on the way to visit

vayshti for dinner, so I carried the book in its box (and it's not a small book - it's about 1 foot x 1.5 foot and 2.5 inches thick) to her house and we spent a good few hours pouring over it and going "Oooh" and "Aaaah" over it.

My copy isn't a first edition. It isn't in mint condition, the dust jacket is pretty torn and the spine of that reads Old Testament Miniatures. It's still a bloody awesome book, and one of a handful owned by Australians. When I die, I've decided I'll bequeath it to the SA Reference Library, so that it's there for future generations interested in history and/or reenacting to access.

Jacob's Vision of a Ladder to Heaven.

A bit about the book:

This book has long been thought to have been created under the direction of Louis IX of France in the mid-1240s, but Allison Stones, after indications of others such as François Avril, has long argued that it was most likely illuminated in the northern counties of France, ca. 1250 (cf most recently Allison Stones, "Questions of style and provenance in the Morgan Bible", in Between the Word and the Picture, Princeton, 2005). Originally it probably contained only paintings, organized in a consistent visual rhythm from page to page. Within 100 years, the book acquired marginal inscriptions in Latin describing the scenes illustrated. Cardinal Bernard Maciejowski, Bishop of Kraków, had the book given as a gift to Abbas I (Shah of Persia) in 1608. Abbas ordered inscriptions in Persian to be added, mostly translating the Latin ones already there. Later, perhaps in the eighteenth century, inscriptions were added in Judeo-Persian. Thus the book consists of beautiful paintings of events from Hebrew scripture, set in the scenery and customs of thirteenth-century France, depicted from a Christian perspective, and surrounded by text in three scripts and five languages (Latin, Persian, Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Hebrew). - Galbithink.

It has several names - The Morgan Bible, The Morgan Bible of Louis IX, The Book of Kings,The Crusader Bible, and The Maciejowski Bible. It is a medieval picture Bible of 43 folios and is *gorgeous*.

So that is how I came to spend so much money on one book.