Book 3

The Archimedes Codex: revealing the secrets of the world's greatest palimpsest by Reviel Netz and William Noel.

When you work in a library, stumbling across fascinating books is a bit of an occupational hazard.  I have been reading this one during my lunch breaks for a while.  It's part of our Popular Science Collection.

"At 2pm on October 29th, 1998, at Christie’s auction house in New York, a very special old book was sold to an anonymous collector for $2,000,000. This collector deposited the manuscript at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in order to conserve it, image it, and study it. The book is special because it contains seven treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Two of these treatises, The Stomachion and The Method exist nowhere else in the world."

So part of it reads like the script for an action thriller - who is this anonymous collector? Part of it takes you back to the scholarship of Archimedes - ancient communications - I just read a lovely bit about how scrolls of papyrus which were made in Egypt, shipped to Syracuse and Archimedes  carefully wrote down his findings in the form of a letter to Eratosthenes in Alexandria. - so that scroll made it's way back to Egypt. That we know about it is mere happenstance and it provides a great example of how remarkable the codex find is in itself. Medieval repurposing the original treatises into a prayer book and the late 20th century imaging technology to read the original manuscript and how it all comes together - a true story that makes Dan Brown's fictional concoctions pale in comparison without any of Brown's gratuitous sex and violence.