The auction of several items from the collection of Martin Schøyen took place yesterday in London. The highlight of the sale was the so-called Crosby-Schøyen codex, which sold for just over the high end of the estimated price range at £ 3,065,000. Other items, such as the cover of Nag Hammadi Codex I, seem not have sold.

I do not know who purchased the Crosby-Schøyen codex. According to the BBC, “A spokesperson [for Christie’s] said they could not reveal who bought the book due to client confidentiality.”

The book seems to have been a sound financial investment. When it appeared on the market in 1955, it was sold to the University of Mississippi (together with a substantial part of another codex and loose papyri) for $5,000. When the University of Mississippi sold this codex and the portion of the other codex to the dealer H.P. Kraus in 1981, the reported cost was $250,000. When just our codex alone was sold to Martin Schøyen in 1988, the reported sale price was £ 200,000 (about $350,000 at the time).¹ And now the book has sold for £ 3,065,000 (about $3,900,000). So, even accounting for cumulative inflation over time, the cost of the book has soared.

In any event, I do hope the new custodian of the codex will keep it available to scholars for study.

1. These earlier purchase prices are reported in J.M. Robinson, “The Manuscript’s History and Codicology,” in J.E. Goehring (ed.), The Crosby-Schøyen Codex MS 193 in the Schøyen Collection (Peeters, 1990), xvii-xlvii. ↩︎