An examination of papers found in an attic in 1999, and acquired by the Tate Archive, contain references to a hunchback sculptor working at Notre Dame during the time period Victor Hugo’s The Hunch Back of Notre Dame was being written.

Clues suggesting that Quasimodo is based on a historical figure have been uncovered in the memoirs of Henry Sibson, a 19th-century British sculptor who was employed at the cathedral at around the time the book was written and who describes a hunched back stonemason also working there.

The documents were acquired by the Tate Archive in 1999 after they were discovered in the attic of a house in Penzance, Cornwall, as the owner prepared to move out.

However, the references to a “hunchback sculptor” working at Notre Dame have only just been discovered, as the memoirs are catalogued ahead of the archive’s 40th anniversary this year.

The seven-volume memoirs document Sibson’s time in Paris during the 1820s, when he was employed by contractors to work on repairs to Notre Dame Cathedral.

In one entry, he writes: “the [French] government had given orders for the repairing of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and it was now in progress … I applied at the Government studios, where they were executing the large figures [for Notre Dame] and here I met with a Mons. Trajan, a most worthy, fatherly and amiable man as ever existed – he was the carver under the Government sculptor whose name I forget as I had no intercourse with him, all that I know is that he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers.”

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I don’t post gossip on this site, but this story does have a historical aspect to it. An antique dealer and book collector stole a Shakespeare First Folio and mutilated the treasure to hide it’s origins before attempting to sell it to fund an affair he was having.

Folio – one of the first collections of Shakespeare’s plays – from an exhibition of English literature at Durham University’s Palace Green Library in December 1998.

Scott kept the folio hidden for ten years until his debts reached more than £90,000 and he decided the time had come to sell it.

He had been sending Heidi Garcia Rios, whom he met at a hotel where she worked in Havana, large sums of money and provided her with a card so she could withdraw cash in Cuba, the court heard.

Scott tore off the binding, boards and some pages with identifying marks, then took the folio to the world-renowned Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and asked for it to be verified as genuine, the court heard.’

One expert there called it ‘a cultural legacy that has been damaged, brutalised and mutilated’.

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Archaeologists in Scotland are hunting for a lost monastery referenced in the margins of the old-surviving manuscript in the country which dates back to the 10th century.

The book contains seven handwritten passages of Gaelic text, written in the margins.

These describe – among other things – how a monastery was founded by St Columba and St Drostan at Deer, near Mintlaw.

It has never been established exactly how big the building was, how long it survived or how many monks lived there.

Archaeologists from Glasgow University were yesterday drafted in by the friends of the Book of Deer group to try to trace any remains of the building.

Their meticulous search, which has so far failed to yield any clues, is taking place inside the old church at Old Deer and in the church graveyard.

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Cambridge University plans to digitize and put online some rare books from their collection.

The first collections to be digitised will be entitled The Foundations of Faith and The Foundations of Science. The goal for both is that they become ‘living libraries’ with the capacity to grow and evolve.

The Library’s faith collections are breathtaking. They include some of the oldest and most significant Qur’ans ever to be uncovered, as well an Eighth Century copy of Surat al-Anfal. The Library also holds the world’s largest and most important collection of Jewish Genizah materials, including the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection – 193,000 fragments of manuscripts as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Its Christian holdings include an incomparable collection of manuscripts including the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis (one of the most important Greek New Testament manuscripts), the Book of Deer and the Book of Cerne.

The University Library also holds some of the world’s most important records of the development of modern science – including the most comprehensive collection of Newton’s papers (heavily annotated copies of Principia, lectures as Lucasian Professor and proofs of Opticks), and those of John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley, contemporaries of Newton, with whom he corresponded.

If the project proves successful (further funding is needed and other donors are being sought), the collections of scientific giants such as Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, and Stephen Hawking could also be digitised, along with other major collections in the fields of humanities and social sciences.

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An Armenian church in Californa is suing the Getty Museum over seven pages from a 13th century Bible which the church says the museum bought illegally.

The Western Prelacy claims that the seven pages, which date back to 1256, were ripped from the Armenian Orthodox Church’s Zeyt’un Gospels during the Armenian Genocide, according to the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of Americas is requesting that the pages be returned.

“We expect the Getty to do the right thing,” Levon Kirakosian, a spokesman for the prelacy, told the Glendale News-Press.

The Getty states on its website that the illustrations by T’oros Roslin were “separated from the manuscript at some point in the past” and were acquired by the museum.
“The Getty is confident that it has legal ownership of these pages, known as Canon Tables, which have been widely published, studied and exhibited,” the museum’s spokeswoman, Julie Jaskol, said in a statement.

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