Bibliophiles And Bibliothieves

Download or read book Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves written by Opritsa D. Popa and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves, Opritsa Popa has documented what might justifiably be described as the most celebrated case of looting of two German cultural treasures by a member of the U.S. Army at the end of World War II and their subsequent odyssey across both an ocean and a continent: the pilfering from a cellar in Bad Wildungen of the ninth-century Liber Sapientiae, containing the two leaves of the oldest extant German heroic poem, the Old High German Hildebrandslied, along with the fourteenth-century illuminated Willehalm codex, both of which had been removed from the State Library in Kassel for protection from bombing raids.