LITERARY SPOILS

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 366, 22 February 1937, Page 8

LITERARY SPOILS

GENUINE TREASURES FOR SALE MANUSCRIPT OF THE RUBAIYAT LONDON. Oct. 28. At Sotheby’s auction rooms next month there will come under the hammer some genuine literary treasures. One will be the first Protestant prayer-book, a vellum manuscript of Luther’s compositions, attributed in its execution to the reformer’s secretary, and dating back to 1510. It gives Luther’s prayers in their original form - as distinct from that adopted in the first printed edition. Older than this is the MS copy, credited to some scribe of Bagdad in the year 14 63, of Omar Khayyam’s immdrtal Rubaiyat. The leaves are of gold-sprinkled paper, and it is Relieved to be the oldest copy extant after the Cuseley MS in the Bodleian Library, which is dated just three years earlier. The latter was the one from which Edward Fitzgerald made his unique translation—the only example of a translation greater than the Original; There will also be some letters by Lawrence of Arabia, on current politics, with a reference to the pang with which Aircraftman Shaw left the R.A.F.