Peter Phillips

Bolivian treasure

issue 03 November 2012

Every so often in my line of business one reads heartwarming stories about manuscripts from the past turning up in unlikely places. The most favoured of these places over the years has probably been bricked-up chimney stacks in Tudor manor houses, where one supposes the terrified owners once thrust documents that would have incriminated them with the prevailing religious authorities. These documents might well have included music written for whichever Church was currently out of fashion; and so it is that pieces of music thought to be long lost have reappeared centuries later, both Protestant and Catholic. There is every chance that further discoveries will be made.

Other places have included municipal and monastic libraries. The opening-up of the former Soviet libraries in the early 1990s provided a major opportunity, not least because many of them had scarcely been catalogued, though in fact some of the best discoveries have been in our own expertly catalogued collections, where unwanted material was found to have been used as binding in the spines of volumes dedicated to quite other subjects.

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