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Saturday 21 July 2018

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US prayer book sells for record breaking £8m

A tiny book of psalms from 1640, believed to be the first book printed in the US, sells for $14.2 million (£8.8m) setting an auction record for a printed book

The Bay Psalm Book, believed to be the first book printed in what is now the US, sold at Sotheby's auction house in New York for $14.2 million (£8.8m) on Tuesday evening.

Only 11 copies of the Bay Psalm Book survive in varying degrees of completeness.

It was bought by American businessman and philanthropist David Rubenstein, who plans to lend it to libraries around the country.

A copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America was the previous record-holder. It sold for $11.5m (£7.1m) at Sotheby's in 2010.

The book is one of two owned by Boston's Old South Church. Samuel Adams was a member and Benjamin Franklin was baptised at the church, which was established in 1669.

At one time, the church owned five copies of the 6-by-5-inch book. One is now at the Library of Congress, another at Yale University and a third at Brown University.

The book was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, just 20 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.

The book was supposed to be a faithful translation into English of the original Hebrew psalms. Puritans believed selected paraphrases would compromise their salvation.

The 1,700 copies were printed on a press shipped over from London.

The last time a copy came on the auction block, in 1947, it sold for a record auction price of $151,000 (£93,106)

The Leonardo da Vinci Codex Hammer, a personal notebook of scientific writings and diagrams, sold for $30.8m (£19m) at Christie's in 1994.

Source: APTN

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