Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today's episode is
Speaker 1: another classic from our previous host, Christian Sagar. These days,
Speaker 1: with printing and digital technologies being what they are, books
Speaker 1: can be very affordable, but when you get into collector territory,
Speaker 1: prices can be astounding. Today's question is what is the
Speaker 1: most expensive book in the world? Hey brain Stuff, It's
Speaker 1: me Christian Sagar. Sometimes I like to imagine that long
Speaker 1: after I'm dead, a wealthy philanthropist is going to buy
Speaker 1: my diary for millions of dollars and lend it to
Speaker 1: museums across the planet. Then everyone would finally know the
Speaker 1: answer to today's question, what is the most expensive book
Speaker 1: in the world? Something by William Shakespeare, The Necronomicon, Twilight,
Speaker 1: New Moon. Well, it all depends on if the book
Speaker 1: is printed or if it's handwritten. If we're talking books
Speaker 1: that have had multiple copies printed, then the answer is
Speaker 1: the Bay Psalm Book, which sold for more than fourteen
Speaker 1: million dollars in November. It was originally printed by Puritans
Speaker 1: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in sixteen forty. Seeking religious freedom. These
Speaker 1: settlers wanted their own translation of the Old Testament. Today
Speaker 1: there are only eleven copies remaining, and it is considered
Speaker 1: the first book printed in America. But if we include
Speaker 1: one of a kind handwritten texts, then the base Psalm
Speaker 1: Book isn't even worth half the value of the most
Speaker 1: expensive book ever sold. That title goes to Leonardo da
Speaker 1: Vinci's Codex Lester, which sold for thirty point eight million
Speaker 1: dollars in nineteen ninety four to a little known computer
Speaker 1: programmer by the name of Bill Gates ad just that
Speaker 1: amount for inflation, and today the Codex is almost worth
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars. In fact, that's forty nine million, five
Speaker 1: d eight thousand, five hundred and sixty one dollars and
Speaker 1: forty cents if you want to be technical. It's an unbound,
Speaker 1: seventy two page notebook filled with da Vinci's drawings and thoughts,
Speaker 1: mainly about how to move water. Yeah, the most expensive
Speaker 1: book in the world is basically a plumbing manual. More
Speaker 1: on that in a minute. A lot of da Vinci's
Speaker 1: writing was lost to history, almost half of it, in fact,
Speaker 1: so the Codex Lester is mainly important because it's a
Speaker 1: single collection of his focused ideas. The Codex is written,
Speaker 1: like many of da Vinci's works, in something called mirror hand.
Speaker 1: All the letters are reversed and it's written from right
Speaker 1: to left, so the only way you can read it
Speaker 1: is when it's held up to a mirror, and you
Speaker 1: probably need a fluency and antiquated Italian as well. So
Speaker 1: it's a book about water that's written backwards. Well, to
Speaker 1: be fair, that's oversimplifying things a bit. It's primarily about
Speaker 1: how astronomy and geology relate to water, considering the functionality
Speaker 1: of tides, eddies, and dams. Really, da Vinci was trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how to harness the power of moving water.
Speaker 1: He demonstrates how pressure increases with depth in a fluid,
Speaker 1: and the Codex examines configurations of siphons and differently shaped pipes.
Speaker 1: He's particularly interested in the fluid mechanics of how water
Speaker 1: moves around obstacles. This manuscript was first purchased in seventeen
Speaker 1: seventeen by a guy named Thomas Coke, who later became
Speaker 1: the Earl of Lester, hence the title Codex Lester, But
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty an art collector named armand Hammer bought it,
Speaker 1: changing its name to the more badass Codex Hammer. This
Speaker 1: only lasted fourteen years though, until Gates bought it and
Speaker 1: changed it back then he made it into a screensaver
Speaker 1: for windows. Actually, Gates seems genuinely inspired by Da Vinci's
Speaker 1: example of pushing himself to find more knowledge. He's even
Speaker 1: loaned the book to a number of museums over the
Speaker 1: years so it can be viewed and studied by the public.
Speaker 1: So that's the most expensive book in the world for now,
Speaker 1: until the Codex Sager hits the South Aby's auction block.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Christian and produced by Tyler Clay.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: how Stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production off
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