Abstract
The 11th September 2003 was quite an ordinary working day in the Royal Library - at least for the first few hours in the morning. At approximately 11.00 a.m., however, I was interrupted by the telephone. A polite lady introduced herself as the rare book specialist from Christie’s in London. From a consignor she had received the following work for sale: Propalladia de Bartholome de Torres Naharro. Dirigida... Napoles: por Ioan Pasqueto de Sallo, Naples 1517. Her investigation of a critical edition of Torres Naharro’s works from 1943 had established that only two copies of this particular work were known to exist. One incomplete copy in the National Library of Spain in Madrid, and one complete copy in The Royal Library in Copenhagen. This puzzled the keeper of books at the auction company, and she was keen to know whether she had a historic sensation in her hands or simply a stolen book.
Highlights
I had to inform her that this extremely rare book had been missing from the collections of the Royal Library since 28th February 1979
This was not, that easy to do, as Erland Kolding Nielsen was taking part in an important meeting in Jutland, in which the subject was the future of cultural politics for the research libraries in Denmark. He came to the telephone and immediately ordered me to go to London as soon as possible and this was a little impolite to Christie’s, I invited myself and the librarian who had been in charge of our revision of the foreign collection to come to London as soon as possible to investigate the matter. In this way I acquired a highly qualified witness, as no one else in the Royal Library had ever had so many of our rare books in her hands
At last I decided to phone Interpol in Copenhagen and the result of this call was another one to the Arts and Antique Squad at Scotland Yard
Summary
I had to inform her that this extremely rare book had been missing from the collections of the Royal Library since 28th February 1979. On that particular day the systematic revision of our collection of older, foreign printed books - caused by the regrettable fact that the Royal Library had been subjected to a number of thefts in the 1970s - had reached volume 18, p.
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