The Columbus letter is particularly attractive to forgers “because it is valuable and it’s short,” said Christina Geiger, a senior specialist with Christie’s Books & Manuscripts department in New York. “It’s not easy to forge printed books. The value to length ratio in the letter is going to be very high.”
Mr. Janz added that many Columbus letters “end up in the United States where there is a market for them.’’
In 2016, American officials returned a copy that belonged to the Riccardiana Library in Florence, Italy, and earlier this month, they returned a copy that had been stolen from the National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. Both letters had been substituted with skillful forgeries.
The Vatican was advised of the theft in 2012, a year after United States Homeland Security Investigations got a tip from a rare book and manuscript expert who had seen the Vatican copy and raised doubts about its authenticity.
In December 2013, Mr. Parsons sent his “Plannck II — Columbus Letter” to the same expert for authentication, according to American officials. The expert, who declined to be identified for this article, found that while the letter had been bound in modern times, an earlier binding was the same as the Vatican’s copy, officials said.
In 2017, the two editions of the letter — the Vatican and the Parsons copy — were compared and an expert determined that Mr. Parson’s copy had indeed been stolen from Volume 674.
Mary Parsons, the widow of the American purchaser of the letter, said the theft was a personal tragedy as well that haunted her husband. “Perhaps, to others, it is an interesting story,’’ she wrote in an email. “For me, it is seeing and remembering the disappointment David experienced thinking the collection he loved so much could be tainted by the thought of the Columbus Letter being a forgery or stolen.”
Returning it to the Vatican Library, she wrote, is what her husband “would have wanted.”
Source : Nytimes
