Something extraordinary came into my possession today. It's a page from an old German book, depicting a scene beloved of Christian anti-semites (see Matthew 27:25 for the text of the twisting speech scroll, explained in German overleaf: das die juden die rachsal des pluts cristi über sich genummen haben). I felt I should take it out of circulation. Also, it cost just $5 (!!).I guessed it was pretty old but was unprepared for what I found when I did a little internet sleuthing (with the help of google image); it's from Das Buch der Schatzbehälter, oder, Schrein der waren Reichtumer des Heils und ewyger Seligkeit genant (page 291), a book published in Leipzig in 1491 (!!!). That's pre-Reformation, indeed pre-Columbian!
How this page (it's the seventy-fourth plate) came to be separated out I don't know, but it's well known that old illustrated books are often bought at auctions (or stolen from libraries) and dismembered for parts, the individual images sometimes fetching a higher price than the book did. Perhaps its companion images are individually framed, hanging on people's walls somewhere. But this might also be a case where someone ripped this particular page out of a book, perhaps for the reason I didn't return it to the pile of prints where I found it.
It's another mystery how it came to wind up at Housing Works thriftshop on 17th Street in Manhattan, five hundred twenty-seven years after publication. (Housing Works, an AIDS charity, is full of objects with stories we'll never know.) And the next question: what do I do with it? I'm inclined to give it to a library somewhere.
