• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“You can have it,” said Sperr. “I don’t need it.”

Drewe apologized again and left the shop.

Sperr made a quick calculation: This was the professor’s tenth or eleventh visit, and he had spent a grand total of £10. Perhaps it was time to show him some of his better inventory.

A few weeks and several visits later, he invited Drewe to see a collection he reserved for his regular customers: first editions and other one-of-a-kind volumes, some with handmade pages and illustrations. He guided Drewe up a narrow spiral staircase that was roped off by a blue velvet cord with gold tassels and led to a tiny rare-books room with a single window, a fireplace, and a thin red rug on the floor.

A whole shelf had been set aside for two hundred thick volumes of religious texts, each one about fifteen inches high and nine inches wide. This, Sperr said, was a compilation of all of the known research and writings of the Catholic Church from A.D. 200 to the 1400s. Written in Greek and Latin, the set was known as the Patrologiae Cursus Completus . Sperr had at one time owned all 382 volumes, but over the years he had sold several of them to Catholic institutions and libraries. The work was considered a milestone in Church history. Published in the mid-1800s, the Patrologiae included treatises on theology and doctrine, apologias, and studies of saints.

Drewe leafed through one of the volumes and noted that the title page bore a blue oval stamp with the inscription “St. Philip’s Priory, Begbroke, Oxford—O.S.M.” Another volume had a similar stamp that read “St. Mary’s Priory, Fulham, London—O.S.M.” Sperr explained that the initials referred to the Order of the Servants of Mary, a brotherhood of friars devoted to the Virgin Mother. St. Philip’s and St. Mary’s were two of the order’s priories. Sperr had bought the Patrologiae some fifteen years earlier from the library at St. Philip’s.

Drewe seemed fascinated. “I’d love to spend more time with this,” he said.

Sperr left him alone and went off to mind the shop. He could hear the professor pacing around upstairs and wondered whether he would finally spend a little money.

It was no news to bibliophiles that convents and monasteries often harbored valuable old books, manuscripts, and works of ecclesiastical art. Aficionados of rare books knew of dozens of great inside stories. One of the more famous concerned the near-mythical manuscript of the Lindisfarne Gospels, written and illustrated—or “illuminated”—by an eighth-century monk on a remote island in Northumbria. Over the centuries the leather-bound, jewel-encrusted volume had been transferred from one priory to the next, finally ending up in the British Museum. Book dealers dreamed of finding such ancient treasures in obscure church libraries, and were always on the lookout for oddities like the Breeches Bible or the Vinegar Bible.18

Art dealers, too, dreamed of finding rare works, paintings hidden beneath decades of soot from vigil candles and coal-burning stoves, a Caravaggio discovered in a village church in France or a Michelangelo behind an altar in Tuscany. Such miracles had taken place. Thus, Drewe reasoned, it was not inconceivable that the odd work of art might have made its way to the three-hundred-year-old former estate near Oxford that was now home to St. Philip’s Priory.

Shortly after, Drewe sat down at his dining table and began what would become a long correspondence with the friars at St. Philip’s. His ultimate aim, of course, was to find a weakness he could exploit to provenance another batch of fakes.

Drewe wrote that he represented two businessmen who had bought several dozen volumes of the Patrologiae from Fisher & Sperr. Inside, they had found sketches attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and Sebastiano Ricci, along with a number of much more recent watercolors by Graham Sutherland, a twentieth-century English artist known for his works on religious themes. The businessmen wanted to sell the works and needed written assurance that they had once belonged to the priory and were sold according