World’s Oldest Privately Owned Book Sells for $3.8 Million at UK Auction

World’s Oldest Privately Owned Book Sells for $3.8 Million at UK Auction.

London, June 11, 2024: The world’s oldest privately owned book, the Crosby-Schoyen Codex, sold for over £3 million ($3.8 million) at a Christie’s auction in London on Tuesday.

This ancient text was previously owned by a Norwegian businessman and rare book collector Martin Schoyen.

The book contains the earliest complete copies of two biblical texts: the Book of Jonah and Peter’s First Epistle.

Bidding for the codex began at £1.7 million, attracting a mix of enthusiastic online and in-person bidders.

Finally, the auction was settled at the final sale price of £3,065,000 ($3,898,000) including taxes, with the winning bid coming from an anonymous phone bidder.

According to the story surrounding this codex, it was discovered by Egyptian farmers in the 1950s, and was originally copied by a monk in what is now Egypt around the fourth century AD.

This makes it at least 1,600 years old, significantly predating other renowned ancient texts such as the Gutenberg Bible from the 1450s.

The text is written in Coptic script on double-sided papyrus leaves, now preserved between plexiglass plates, showcasing advances in written technology from a time when single-sided scrolls were more common.

Also sold in addition to the Crosby-Schoyen Codex, were twelve other select pieces from the Schoyen Collection which were auctioned off. The Schoyen Collection includes over 20,000 pieces, spanning 5,000 years of history from 3,500 BC to the present day.

Last year, the Codex Sassoon, a Hebrew Bible over 1,000 years old, sold for $38.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York, setting a new record. This surpassed the $30.8 million paid by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1994 for Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester manuscript.

The most expensive historical document remains one of the first prints of the US Constitution, which sold for $43 million at Sotheby’s in November 2021.