mean objects of which only one example now remains, as is the case for several postage stamps, books, engravings, and sound-recordings; or, finally, it can mean objects rendered unique by this or that detail of their history: the pen with which the Treaty of Versailles was initialled and signed, the bread basket into which the head of Louis XVI or Danton rolled, the stub of the piece of chalk Einstein used at his memorable 1905 lecture, the first milligram of pure radium isolated by the Curies in 1898, the Ems Telegram, the boxing gloves Dempsey wore to defeat Carpentier on 21 July 1921, Tarzan’s first underpants, Rita Hayworth’s glove in Gilda , are all classic instances of this last category of unica , the most common but also the most slippery class, when you think that any object whatsoever can always be identified uniquely, and that in Japan there is a factory mass-producing Napoleon’s hat, or Napoleon hats.
Scepticism and passion are the two traits of unica -lovers. Scepticism will lead them to amass an excess of evidence of the genuineness and – especially – of the uniqueness of the sought-after object; passion will lead them into sometimes boundless gullibility. It was with these two traits in mind that the confidence tricksters succeeded in stripping Sherwood of a third of his fortune.
One day in 1896, an Italian workman called Longhi, hired a fortnight earlier to repaint the railings around his estate, came up to the druggist as he was giving his three greyhounds their daily walks, and explained in rather approximate English that three months earlier, he, the workman, had rented a room to a compatriot, a certain Guido Mandetta, who claimed to be a history student; this Guido had gone without warning, leaving behind only an old trunk full of books and papers. Longhi said he’d like to get his money back by selling the books, but was afraid of being swindled, and asked if Sherwood would like to help him. Sherwood didn’t see much to interest him in history textbooks and lecture notes and was about to say no, when Longhi added that the books were mainly old, and in Latin. Sherwood’s curiosity was awakened, and it was not disappointed. Longhi took him back to his house, a big wooden barn, brimful with bambini and masses of mammas, and took him into the little room under the roof where Mandetta had lived; scarcely had he opened the trunk than Sherwood shuddered with surprise and joy: in the midst of a heap of notebooks, loose leaves, pads, newspaper cuttings, and dog-eared books, he discovered an ancient Quarli, one of those sumptuous books with wooden boards and painted edges which the Quarlis printed in Venice between 1530 and 1570 and which have almost entirely disappeared from sight.
Sherwood studied the volume carefully: it was in very poor condition, but there was no doubt that it was genuine. The druggist didn’t hesitate: he pulled two hundred-dollar bills from his billfold and handed them to Longhi; he cut short the Italian uttering jumbled thanks, had the trunk carried over to his house, and began to explore its contents systematically, and as time went on and his discoveries became clearer, his feeling of intense excitement became more and more overwhelming.
The Quarli itself was valuable not just in bibliographic terms. It was the celebrated Vita brevis Helenae by Arnaud de Chemillé, in which the author, after retracing the main episodes in the life of the mother of Constantine the Great, vividly describes the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the circumstances of the discovery of the True Cross. Inserted into a kind of pocket sewn onto the vellum endpaper were five manuscript sheets, of much later date than the volume but nonetheless very old, probably late eighteenth century: they contained a painstaking, highly detailed compilation enumerating in unending columns of tiny and now almost indecipherable handwriting the locations and specifications of the Relics of the
Scepticism and passion are the two traits of unica -lovers. Scepticism will lead them to amass an excess of evidence of the genuineness and – especially – of the uniqueness of the sought-after object; passion will lead them into sometimes boundless gullibility. It was with these two traits in mind that the confidence tricksters succeeded in stripping Sherwood of a third of his fortune.
One day in 1896, an Italian workman called Longhi, hired a fortnight earlier to repaint the railings around his estate, came up to the druggist as he was giving his three greyhounds their daily walks, and explained in rather approximate English that three months earlier, he, the workman, had rented a room to a compatriot, a certain Guido Mandetta, who claimed to be a history student; this Guido had gone without warning, leaving behind only an old trunk full of books and papers. Longhi said he’d like to get his money back by selling the books, but was afraid of being swindled, and asked if Sherwood would like to help him. Sherwood didn’t see much to interest him in history textbooks and lecture notes and was about to say no, when Longhi added that the books were mainly old, and in Latin. Sherwood’s curiosity was awakened, and it was not disappointed. Longhi took him back to his house, a big wooden barn, brimful with bambini and masses of mammas, and took him into the little room under the roof where Mandetta had lived; scarcely had he opened the trunk than Sherwood shuddered with surprise and joy: in the midst of a heap of notebooks, loose leaves, pads, newspaper cuttings, and dog-eared books, he discovered an ancient Quarli, one of those sumptuous books with wooden boards and painted edges which the Quarlis printed in Venice between 1530 and 1570 and which have almost entirely disappeared from sight.
Sherwood studied the volume carefully: it was in very poor condition, but there was no doubt that it was genuine. The druggist didn’t hesitate: he pulled two hundred-dollar bills from his billfold and handed them to Longhi; he cut short the Italian uttering jumbled thanks, had the trunk carried over to his house, and began to explore its contents systematically, and as time went on and his discoveries became clearer, his feeling of intense excitement became more and more overwhelming.
The Quarli itself was valuable not just in bibliographic terms. It was the celebrated Vita brevis Helenae by Arnaud de Chemillé, in which the author, after retracing the main episodes in the life of the mother of Constantine the Great, vividly describes the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the circumstances of the discovery of the True Cross. Inserted into a kind of pocket sewn onto the vellum endpaper were five manuscript sheets, of much later date than the volume but nonetheless very old, probably late eighteenth century: they contained a painstaking, highly detailed compilation enumerating in unending columns of tiny and now almost indecipherable handwriting the locations and specifications of the Relics of the
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