Book Shorts The Sultan’s Elephant, a tribute to Jules Verne, brought London to a halt on 7 May as the 36-foot high puppet drew thousands to watch its stroll through the city centre. *** As

At 36ft tall, the Sultan’s Elephant is higher than many of London’s landmarks, including Admiralty Arch

NEWS & VIEWS

feared last issue (‘Grave Mistakes’) Sotheby’s, New York, held the auction which ensured the separation of a unique set of longlost watercolours by the English artist and poet William Blake. The Louvre in Paris acquired the finest of the set, known as ‘Death of the

Strong Man’, for $1,584,000 (including buyer’s premium), ten went to various American and European private collectors and the remaining eight failed to reach their reserve price. *** An immaculate copy of Anna Sewell’s much-loved literary treasure Black Beauty is expected to fetch up to £8,000 at auction in June due to a special handwritten message in the front of the book from Anna to her mother – ‘Mary Sewell, from her loving child, AS, 1878.’ *** A New York man has been charged with grand larceny for an e-Bay comic book scam that cost his victim $10,000. The man advertised a collection of rare Spider-Man comics on the internet auction site, which he neither owned nor possessed, and then accepted the money from a collector. *** A publishing company called BedBooks has come up with the idea of printing text sideways on the page so that readers can lie in bed on their side and read at the same time. *** To commemorate Germany’s cultural heritage in World Cup year, a giant sculpture of stacked books called ‘Modern Book Printing’ was unveiled in Berlin. A giant football boot can be spotted elsewhere...

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Berlin, 21 April 2006 Unveiling of the sculpture ‘The Modern Book Printing’; Goethe Institute officials launch the celebration of German ‘ideas’ in books

80 million new, secondhand, rare, and out-of-print books.

KISS OF LIFE

For more than 2,000 years, Christians have believed Judas betrayed Jesus to the Romans with a kiss, but a papyrus found in a tomb in Egypt offers a different history. According to research published by National Geographicmagazine, the text is the lost Gospel of Judas – a document scholars believed to exist because of a reference to it in an anti-heresy tract written around AD 180. The new gospel says Jesus told Judas to betray him, and favoured him above all the disciples. “You will become the thirteenth,” Jesus tells Judas, “and you will be cursed by the other generations – and you will come to rule over them.” Translated from its original Coptic language, the manuscript lay in a safe-deposit box in a New York bank for 16 years, before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. Although greatly damaged, the document was saved by years of restoration. Tests performed by a top carbon-dating laboratory at the University of Arizona date the Codax Tchacos, as it was named, to sometime between AD 220 and 340. The discovery will upset many Christians, and a senior Vatican historian has branded it a ‘product of religious fantasy’.

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