Tag Archive: 0book thieves

Here are two of Plutarch’s Moralia, published from twelfth-century manuscripts in the Synodal Library in Moscow in 1777 by the German philologist Christian Friedrich Matthäi, and dedicated to Ivan Shuvalov, the Maecenas of the Russian Enlightenment. In 1772, the 28-year-old Matthäi took up a teaching post in Moscow.  Within four years he had become an associate professor […]

Sooner or later, as a bibliophile, you are bound to come across the curse found in the library of the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona: ‘for him that stealeth a book, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him, let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted, […]