Thanks to Mike Holmes for notifying me that the latest issue of Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik contains an article by Museum of the Bible curator Brian Hyland that reports what is now known about the purchase of the Green Collection Sappho fragments. The article expands on a preliminary report by Mike Holmes published here in January 2020.
The article is a detailed overview of Hyland’s efforts to get to the bottom of how Scott Carroll, Professor Dirk Obbink, and the Turkish dealer Yakup Eksioglu together brought these fragments from unknown origins into the Green Collection in late 2011 and early 2012. Perhaps the most interesting new evidence in the article are photographs of the “cartonnage” chunks that contained the Sappho fragments. As Hyland notes, it is remarkable that all the Sappho fragments are placed in an orderly fashion right on the surface of the chunks. I reproduce one of Hyland’s figures here:
Image source: Brian D. Hyland, “A Note on the Provenance of the Sappho Fragments P.GC. inv. 105,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 218 (2021), 1–16.
The clear and sensible fashion in which the Sappho fragments are placed on the surface of the “cartonnage” is very reminiscent of the Green Collection 1 Samuel papyrus that also came from “a Turkish dealer“:
I’ll have more to say as I digest the data in this article.
Last week, the news broke that Brill had retracted a chapter by Prof. Dirk Obbink that presented false information about the provenance of the Sappho papyri. A statement from the volume’s editors explains the reasoning for the retraction. Just as he denies the charges against him in relation to stolen Oxyrhynchus papyri, Prof. Obbink denies these charges and promises to produce exonerating evidence:
“Michael Sampson has published an article that also questions the provenance of the papyri as reported in chapter 2 of this book (Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 57 [2020] 143-169). Dirk Obbink, the author of this chapter, was given the opportunity by Brill publishers to respond to this evidence, but so far they have not received a substantive response. He has told them that he is working on an academic article in which he disputes the findings of Sampson, but he has not mentioned a timeline.”
I think we all look forward to Prof. Obbink’s response in this matter, just as we continue to look forward to seeing the documents related to the alleged collection history of the Sappho papyrus, which Prof. Obbink reportedly committed to release back in 2015 in a Live Science article:
“In the coming months, Obbink said the plan is to make the collecting documents and related photographs of the London Sappho papyrus available online, including letters, transcripts and other papers from people, including Robinson, who worked on this collection early on.”
So, it will be very welcome when Prof. Obbink produces this article and these documents. In the meantime, however, it’s good to know that there are people at Brill who are taking this matter seriously. To the best of my knowledge, retracted articles are rare in the field of classics, so this is a significant action.
The editors also included a statement regarding the authenticity of the papyrus:
“So far we have not seen any evidence to suggest that either P.GC inv. 105 or P.Sapph.Obbink is not authentic.”
The phrasing here gives me pause. [[Update 30 March 2021: Jona Lendering also found this sentence odd.]] On the one hand, when I look at the available images of these manuscripts, I see fragments that have the appearance of papyri that were produced in antiquity by a skilled copyist.
But on the other hand, that’s just the thing: I’m looking at images–and images that are not of very high quality. How many scholars have actually examined these papyri in person? That’s an honest question. I don’t know that the larger “London” fragment has ever been closely physically examined by anyone besides Prof. Obbink. He has reported that the London fragment has been subjected to scientific testing, but as I have argued elsewhere, those claims are dubious.
Plates of the Sappho papyri published in ZPE 189 (2014), obviously reduced in size here
So, in the absence of the physical object, what other indications of forgery might one consider? Well, the textual contents of the poem may be a good place to begin. Prof. Obbink himself raised the issue in his TLS article announcing the papyrus in 2014 (no longer available online):
“How can we be certain…that these new fragments are genuine? After all, you might wonder, doesn’t ‘The Brothers Poem’ rather too conveniently fill a gap in what we don’t know of Sappho and her family? And doesn’t it rather suspiciously confirm Herodotus, in mentioning two names we know, and none that we don’t?”
Well, yes, now that you mention it. That is quite convenient. Prof. Obbink continues:
“Some scholars did, at first, doubt its authenticity, including one of the editors of the last ‘New Sappho’ to be discovered. But other indicators leave no room for doubt. Metre, language and dialect are all recognizably Sapphic and (more difficult for a forger to achieve) there are no contrary indications whatsoever of date or handwriting.”
“But early reactions from even some erudite scholars publicly condemned the texts as ‘a playful modern exercise’ or as ‘frigid juvenilia’. Mary Beard wrote to Martin West for confirmation before the TLS article appeared. Here is what he replied: ‘My initial impression was that it was very poor stuff, and linguistically problematic. But the more I look at it, the more OK it seems. It’s certainly not one of her best, but it has her DNA all over it.'”
It’s my impression that the majority of Sappho specialists regard the poetry as authentically ancient and not a modern exercise in Greek lyric composition. Indeed, I cannot name a single expert who is on record as thinking the poems are forgeries. But it is worth remembering that in the early days, some of the most respected of those experts had a different reaction.
I have not seen much subsequent discussion of the possibility that these papyri could be modern forgeries. The exception is a balanced and thoughtful essay by Theo Nash, who makes many salient points and settles carefully on an evaluation that the papyrus is an ancient rather than a modern production, most likely a looted antiquity. I agree with almost everything he wrote, with two reservations. First, he views the poem as “utterly dull,” whereas forgeries are more typically sensational (such as the Jesus’ Wife fragment). Here, I would simply note that, for many people, any new Sappho at all is sensational per se. Second, Nash writes that “our [hypothetical] faker may have been deeply familiar with Sappho — but the effort would be quite extraordinary.” If these fragments are modern fakes, I don’t think there is any question that the person who produced them is very familiar with Sappho. But how “extraordinary” would the effort at composition have been? The Greek composition training that I received in graduate school certainly did not impart the ability to produce something like the text on these fragments, but there are people for whom ancient language composition is a passion.
This includes both enthusiastic amateurs who produce handbooks on Sapphic composition and academics who edit texts. For his contribution to a Festschrift published in 2011, Prof. Obbink wrote a chapter entitled “Vanishing Conjecture: Lost Books and their Recovery from Aristotle to Eco.” In it, he reflected on the processes through which pieces of classical literature are lost and recovered (I note in passing that one of the prime examples in the chapter is the poetry of Sappho).
In discussing the recovery of ancient literature, Prof. Obbink introduces the competitive academic world of summoning lost texts from medieval compendia and fragmentary papyri. Prof. Obbink offers his own somewhat harsh evaluation of the efforts of other scholars (“Janko’s hypotheses have since been refuted and are now generally derided”) and defends his own compositional skills and choices:
“What constitutes a legitimate fragment, and when are we justified in reconstructing a lost original? By what criteria will recovery be judged a success? I remember being disheartened when a scholar who I thought understood editorial method told me that an edition of a papyrus I had published was, as he put it, ‘all you’, rather than the text of the ancient author in question, just because the ends of some of the lines were restored.”
In this world of filling lacunae and making conjectural emendations, scholars cultivate the ability to finish the thoughts of ancient authors, losing one’s own identity and adopting that of the ancient author (sidenote: Does anyone know who came up with the designation “P.Sapph.Obbink”?). In such a world, the charge “all you” is a solid burn. All of that to say: While most classical scholars might not be up to the task of producing Sapphic lines to order, I have no doubt that there are modern scholars who could do so with little trouble.
Finally, there’s the issue of the treatment of the Green Collection fragments. As a curator at the Museum of the Bible noticed last year, in the now (in)famous video of Scott Carroll faking extractions of literary papyri from mummy masks at Baylor University, one of the wet clumps included the Green Collection Sappho fragments, now known to have been purchased by the Greens from the Turkish dealer Yakup Eksioglu weeks before their “discovery” at Baylor.
The sight of these papyri, lying in a pile sopping wet being picked at by well-meaning but untrained amateurs, is shocking. Carefully humidifying ancient papyrus to unfold it without damage is a time-tested technique for flattening out papyri so that they can be mounted between glass panes for preservation and study. Needlessly drenching ancient papyri in soapy water is simply stupid. Investigations by Ariel Sabar raise the possibility that Carroll already knew that these fragments contained poems by Sappho:
“[Baylor classicist Simon] Burris found a spot at a table where Carroll was drying papyri he’d pulled out of the sink, but soon felt his head spinning. Before him was a small Greek fragment with four-line stanzas in an Aeolic dialect—a hallmark of Sappho, the sixth-century B.C. poet…Burris quickly spotted other pieces—still wet—bearing the same Sapphic markers. He ran their surviving words through a search engine: They not only overlapped with known Sappho poems, but filled in previously unknown lines. …But something felt off. The Sappho pieces had been laid out in such a way that even a non–Sappho expert like him could spot several in just minutes. (He would eventually discover some 20 of them.) He wondered: Did Carroll somehow know what was in the mask before he’d disemboweled it?”
It may of course be the case that Carroll didn’t know the planted papyri contained works of Sappho. [[Update 30 March 2021: see Addendum below]] But given the already existing connections between Carroll, Eksioglu and Prof. Obbink, it seems quite possible that the fragments were known to be Sappho before the event. Nevertheless, they were given a bath. Would an ardent Sappho enthusiast such as Prof. Obbink really allow ancient papyri containing lost lines of Sappho to be so treated without already having undertaken the fullest possible study of the fragments? That would appear strange.
According to Sabar’s report, Carroll did on that day soak an authentic ancient papyrus fragment of Paul’s letter to the Romans stolen from the Oxyrhynchus collection. That immediately suggests the possibility that the Sappho fragments were also authentically ancient and also stolen from the same source. This possibility cannot be ruled out, but it strikes me as doubtful. It seems unlikely that Edgar Lobel, who had a special interest in Sappho and spent almost 40 years working with the Oxyrhynchus collection, would have missed extensive fragments of Sappho like these.
To summarize, then, we have:
Papyrus fragments with sensational and much-desired content
Faked provenance stories for these fragments
Seemingly false claims about scientific testing of these fragments
No access to the main fragment for examination
Early doubts about the quality of the poetry copied on these fragments
Surprisingly cavalier treatment of supposedly highly valuable unique ancient papyri
Given all this, is it really accurate to say that there is no “evidence to suggest that either P.GC inv. 105 or P.Sapph.Obbink is not authentic”? It might be better to say that most (perhaps all?) competent scholars regard these fragments as authentic even in the face of many suspicious circumstances surrounding these papyri.
Let me reiterate. I can’t pass judgement on the authenticity of these papyri. If these fragments are fakes, they are some of the best I’ve ever seen. But then again, I haven’t actually seen them. And other than Prof. Obbink, who has?
Addendum 30 March 2021: Looking again at the relevant sections of Sabar’s article, it seems pretty clear that Carroll did know beforehand that it was Sappho that he was needlessly soaking for his fake extraction: “When I told Carroll what I’d discovered, he acknowledged planting the Sappho and Romans fragments in the mask at Baylor that day. His aim, he said, was to teach students how to identify papyri, not how to dismount a mask. Unsure of what he’d recover from the mask, he decided to mix in some exciting pieces from the Green Collection. ‘At the time, I didn’t feel that it was duplicitous.’ “
In that article, I gave a brief overview of how these books were mutilated and marketed by various actors. The Exodus codex was split up already in the 1990s Here is what I wrote:
“The codices resurfaced for sale in New York in the early 1990s. Again, the books did not sell, but the records of the Norwegian collector Martin Schøyen state that the Exodus codex consisted of more than fifty leaves at that time. At that point, the codex seems to have been divided for sale. One leaf of the codex was purchased by Yale University from a company associated with the Swiss dealer Frieda Tchacos in the mid-1990s. At least one leaf was acquired by the art dealer François Antonovich apparently around the same time. Five leaves were purchased by Schøyen at some point before 1998.”
What I failed to note in that article was that the Yale purchase (in 1996) creates a problem in the standard “timeline” of events associated with these codices. According to the usual story, Frieda Tchacos supposedly acquired the books only in 1999 or 2000. Yet she was already selling bits of the Exodus codex in 1996.
The Schøyen connection is also interesting in this regard. I cannot now recall why I wrote that Schøyen made his purchase “at some point before 1998.” In fact, a chapter by Diletta Minutoli and Rosario Pintaudi states quite clearly that Schøyen bought his leaves a decade earlier, in 1988:
“L’acquisizione dei frammenti di un codice contenente l’Esodo (Schøyen MS187)…risale al 1988 quando Schøyen ne acquistò dall’antiquario americano Bruce Ferrini.”
I don’t think I had appreciated before that Ferrini had some of this material already in the 1980s and Tchacos had some in the mid-1990s. It’s also odd then that James Robinson reports that Schøyen later passed on buying the Gospel of Judas codex because of “bad provenance” (Robinson, The Secrets of Judas, 65-66), since he already owned the Exodus leaves that allegedly come from the same batch of material. This would seem to suggest that the customary provenance story of these manuscripts has some holes in it.
It is also interesting to note that Schøyen has apparently put up his leaves of the Tchacos-Ferrini Exodus codex for sale, according to a 2020 article by Christopher Prescott and Josephine Munch Rasmussen, which examined Norwegian export permits:
“As far as we have been able to ascertain, all Schøyen’s post-2007 applications for export permits have been approved by the National Library, most recently an application dated 14 October 2019, granted 16 October 2019. An application dated 30 April 2018 is for four items to be sold through Bloomsbury Auctions, London. Among the four is one object described as: ‘MS187. Exodus, papyrus manuscript, 4th c. 2ff. 26 x 32 c, under glass.'”
I’m not sure of the current whereabouts of these leaves.
Sources:
Diletta Minutoli and Rosario Pintaudi, “Un codice biblico su papiro della collezione Schøyen MS 187 (Esodo IV 16 – VII 21)” in Guido Bastianini and Angelo Casanova (eds.), I papiri letterari cristiani (Florence: Istituto Papirologico “G. Vitelli,” 2011), 193-205.
Christopher Prescott and Josephine Munch Rasmussen, “Exploring the “Cozy Cabal of Academics, Dealers and Collectors” through the Schøyen Collection,” Heritage 3 (2020), 68-97.
James M. Robinson, The Secrets of Judas (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007).
Among the PAM negatives of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is a short sequence of photos that puzzled me when I encountered them last year. The photos occur in a sequence taken in June 1956, PAM 42.139-141. They are described in the following way Stephen Pfann’s chronological list of PAM negatives:
Descriptions of PAM negatives from Emanuel Tov and Stephen J. Pfann, Companion Volume to the Dead Sea Scrolls Microfiche Edition (2nd rev. ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 86
PAM 42.139 and 42.140 are said to show a “scroll jar” and several artifacts in a “natural setting.” These two photographs are not, as far as I know available in the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library (as they don’t contain any images of actual scrolls). But it was really PAM 42.141 that had most confused me earlier. This photograph is in the Leon Levy online collection. It appears to have been taken outdoors, and it contains a mix of excavated and purchased scrolls from Cave 1 sitting together on the ground! Specifically, 1Q28a (the largest fragment in the image) was part of a purchase from Khalil Iskander Shahin (“Kando”) and not excavated. So, what was it doing sitting outside on the ground together scrolls excavated by archaeologists?
While doing some research this afternoon looking into Najib Anton Albina (1901-1983), the main photographer who worked on the scrolls on the 1950s, I stumbled across an online image of PAM 42.140 on the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library Facebook page that may shed some light on the question:
Here we see not just any “scroll jar,” but one that is fully reconstructed from fragments, along with other items set out for a nicely staged photo shoot, complete with a tipped over vessel containing a coin hoard. It seems reasonable to conjecture that this photograph was taken on the same occasion as the next one in the sequence, PAM 42.141–our mixed group of Cave 1 scroll fragments in a “natural setting.” But what exactly is this “natural setting”?
The Facebook post describes PAM 42.140 as “excavations of Qumran in the 1950’s,” but the reconstructed jar suggests that this material had already spent a good bit of time in the lab. So, a question arises: Where exactly were these photos taken? Surely the reconstructed jar and scrolls were not brought back out to Qumran! It would be good to learn more about the occasion for which these photographs were made, apparently in June of 1956.
In a previous post, I mentioned that the Bodleian Library had made available nice color digital images of the Hawara Homer papyrus roll. They have also added images of several early Christian manuscripts. I provide links to the images at the Digital Bodleian and links to the editions in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri below:
All of these manuscripts are leaves from codices, but unless I’m missing something, there seems to be images of only one side of each of the first three here (Matthew, Acts, and Thomas). That last one in the list, P.Oxy. VII 1010, is a personal favorite. It’s a single leaf of a miniature parchment codex, and for this one, images of both sides are available:
Bodleian Library MS. Gr. bib. g. 3 (P), P.Oxy. VII 1010, 6 Ezra; image source: Digital Bodleian
Once again, many thanks to colleagues at the Bodleian Libraries for making these images freely available (and maybe we can get the other sides of the three other manuscripts soon?).
Thanks to Gregg Schwendner for the alert: In 2019, the Bodleian Library at Oxford posted very nice color digital images (with a scale!) of MS. Gr. class. a. 1 (better known as the Hawara Homer), a copy of books 1 and 2 of the Iliad on papyrus.
Bodleian Library MS. Gr. class. a. 1 (the Hawara Homer); image source: Digital Bodleian
I’ve written about this papyrus on a few occasions on this blog, discussing the story of its discovery in an excavation led by William Matthew Flinders Petrie and the subsequent analysis of its handwriting, the so-called “Rounded Majuscule” (palaeography part 1, part 2, and part 3).
The line number in the left margin in the picture above is modern. It was added by Petrie himself, as was this note at the bottom of the last column of text in book 2:
Bodleian Library MS. Gr. class. a. 1 (the Hawara Homer); image source: Digital Bodleian
Many thanks to the people at the Bodleian who made this possible. I’ll make a separate post about other manuscripts that may be of interest to readers of this blog.
Following up on yesterday’s news about the recovery of more papyri stolen from the Egypt Exploration Society, I learn from an anonymous commenter on an earlier post that there is a neglected (by me, at at least) item on the “timeline” of events associated with the so-called P.Sapph.Obbink papyrus.
Some background: Last year, scholars at the Museum of the Bible reported that the pieces of the papyrus in the Green Collection were purchased in early 2012, citing a “purchase agreement dated January 7, 2012, and signed by Yakup Eksioglu,” a Turkish dealer and, according to reporting in The Atlantic by Ariel Sabar, a close associate of Professor Dirk Obbink. Some of Prof. Obbink’s own accounts of his first recognition of the Sappho papyrus put the date “in January 2012.” While the next couple months saw Scott Carroll fake the extraction of the Green Collection Sappho fragments from mummy cartonnage and then parade the papyri around at different speaking engagements, Prof. Obbink did not announce the existence of the larger fragments (P.Sapph.Obbink) until early 2014, when news broke in The Daily Beast, The Times, and The Times Literary Supplement.
Also last year, Mike Sampson published an article in the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists (and recently summarized here) reporting on the existence of a brochure in pdf format said to be produced by Christie’s offering the Sappho papyrus for sale privately to selected buyers. Sampson’s investigations showed that the document had been produced in connection with a sale (or attempted sale) of the papyrus in August 2013 and then updated for another attempted sale in early 2015.
Now to the new information: The commenter points us to a conference that was set to take place at the University of Reading in September of 2013. A blog post dated 2 September 2013 includes a list of participants and titles of papers. Among them is:
D. Obbink (Oxford): “Sailing to Naukratis: Saphho [sic] on her Brothers”
Although the title says nothing about a new papyrus, and the topic might be simply drawn from information in Herodotus’s description of the courtesan Rhodopis, it seems likely this paper would have been an announcement of the new papyrus. I say “would have been” because the commenter also points out that in the actual online program for the conference, Prof. Obbink’s contribution is not present. It seems the paper was pulled at some point between the blog post on 2 September 2013 and the date of the conference (6-8 September 2013).
It’s the timing that is interesting in connection with the metadata that Sampson extracted from the Christie’s brochure, which suggested an attempted sale of the papyrus in August 2013. The last two timestamps associated with this cluster of metadata came from 27 August, just days before what appears to have been Prof. Obbink’s (aborted) first public announcement of the existence of the papyrus.
There is also another connection here with Scott Carroll. I quote from Sampson’s BASP article:
“As David Meadows has documented on Rogue Classicism, [Scott Carroll] made a presentation to the University of the Nations Workshop in San Antonio del Mar (Mexico) on September 6, 2013, where he brought up Sappho and the Times Literary Supplement before boasting that ‘thirty of these items would be front page news when they’re published,’ a claim that would prove prescient. That date, I note, is less than a month following what I believe was the first private treaty sale of the papyrus.”
It makes you wonder if the public unveiling of the fragment (along with an article in TLS) was planned for some time in September 2013 but delayed for an unknown reason. Finally, as Sampson noted, the metadata of the Christie’s brochure pointed toward a second attempted sale in early 2015, specifically in the period around 13 January 2015 to 26 February 2015, the dates associated with the latest metadata in the pdf file of the Christie’s brochure. On this occasion, the attempted sale seems to have taken place just after Prof. Obbink’s public presentation on the provenance of the papyrus at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies on 9 January 2015. There does seem to be a very close interplay between Prof. Obbink’s academic work on the papyrus and the attempted sale of the papyrus on the antiquities market on more than one occasion. It would be useful to learn more about what appears to be the ongoing relationship between Scott Carroll and Prof. Obbink even after Carroll and the Green Collection parted ways in May 2012.
Earlier today, the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) announced the discovery that more papyri “had been removed from the EES collection without authorisation.” This follows other related announcements over the last several months.
The first announcement by the EES (25 June 2019) noted the possibility that recently published early Christian papyri in the EES collection from Oxyrhynchus were identical to four papyri that were said to have been sold to Hobby Lobby and subsequently donated to the Museum of the Bible. Further investigations revealed that EES materials had indeed been stolen and sold to Hobby Lobby. The next announcement (14 October 2019) identified 13 such fragments. This was followed closely by another announcement (21 October 2019) that 5 additional EES fragments had been stolen and sold to American collector Andrew Stimer. Another announcement (16 November 2019) raised the number of EES items held by Stimer to 6 and noted that an inventory of the EES holdings from Oxyrhynchus “has to date identified around 120 pieces which appear to be missing, almost all from a limited number of folders; it is possible that a few more cases may emerge.”
Today the EES announced that in cooperation with the Museum of the Bible, they had identified an additional 21 fragments that had been stolen and then “acquired by Hobby Lobby and its agents from a number of third parties.” This time, the EES statement did not reveal the contents of these 21 pieces (it would be good to know if any of these pieces are among those that have been displayed over the years by Scott Carroll and others). The announcement goes on to note that the recent repatriation to Egypt of the bulk of the 5000 or so papyri held by Hobby Lobby and the Museum of the Bible likely means that some additional EES materials will probably be included in that lot (thus the task of sorting, identifying, conserving, and providing long-term storage for these pieces will now fall to Egyptian colleagues). Finally, the EES notes that the police investigation into the theft of the papyri in their care is ongoing.
So, out of (at least) 120 missing papyri, 40 have now been identified and are reportedly being returned to the EES. Those that the EES has identified have been exclusively Christian (or possibly Jewish) literary texts. That leaves (at least) 80 or so missing pieces. I find it somewhat strange that the EES has not made publicly known what these pieces are. I am not a specialist in cultural heritage crimes, but it’s my understanding that when thefts occur, it is common practice to let the community know what pieces have gone missing in order that they might be identified when they surface on the market (at least, I take this to be the logic behind, for instance, the “Stolen Art” and “Missing Art” sections of the International Foundation for Art Research Journal).
In any event, hopefully more of the stolen items can be identified, and those responsible for the theft can be brought to justice.
“CAIRO – 27 January 2021: A large group of Egyptian artifacts that were in the possession of the Holy Bible Museum in Washington, USA, arrived at Cairo International Airport on January 27, as a result of the great efforts exerted by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in cooperation with the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the concerned American authorities.”
Many familiar pieces in the article. More thoughts on this in the coming days.
UPDATE 28 January 2021: Some better images of the returned items (including several mummy masks) can be found at Ahram Online (H/T Paul Barford)
I had heard rumors a few years ago that a new facsimile edition of the Beatty Biblical Papyri was in the works. It looks like the New Testament papyri have now appeared courtesy of Hendrickson. This is exciting. The volumes look very nice, judging from the photos on the website. They use the images taken a few years ago by the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. The price, however, is a little disappointing, given that high-quality facsimile editions of manuscripts are now frequently being produced at more reasonable prices.
Variant Readings 