[Ansteorra] For those of you with $185, 000 just lying around...

[Jay Rudin]

Vy wrote:

>Is it possible that his pictures are from another source?
>I swear I've seen one of those grotesques before....... no expert mind you
>she who knows just enough to get in trouble with,

Maybe you're right.  Maybe these pictures are stolen, and he's really selling a dead earthworm.  (By the way, my expert source points out that medieval scribes copied artwork all the time.)

Eve wrote:

> Why put something like this up on e-bay and not a more
> standard auction-house style auction or are these sorts
> of items so common that they just aren't worth the time
> of larger auction houses? Why say that something is
> signed by a certain binder and not include an image of
> this signature?

I don't know.  And neither do you.  So you can either shrug your shoulders and admit you don't know, write him and ask, or make up nasty guesses about him.

Gabriele wrote:

> There is always the possibility that it is stolen. In
> which case it couldn't be sold at an auction house. Of
> course, it could be that the seller just doesn't want
> to have to pay that much to sell it.

So is your theory that he's advertising 140 easily identifiable stolen items in the most public auction in the world, hoping that not one of 140 different victims of theft knows how to do an internet search, or that he is a completely honest merchant 139 times out of 140, and this one item is stolen?  Either way, this is even sillier than the previous accusations.

Let's actually look at the evidence we have.  He's a phenomenally well-respected seller (100% approval rating from his customers).  He has a store name (The-Word Antiquarian Books).  He's a professional antiquarian currently listing 140 items in a price range from $23 to $950,000, including 36 Bibles from several different centuries.

And people in the SCA who haven't researched him have accused him of fraud and / or theft, inventing wilder and wilder theories when the simple ones get shot down.

There is zero evidence of any kind of wrong-doing here, and a fair amount of evidence of an honest shop doing honest business.  If he ever hears what's been said about him here, and then hears that the SCA cares about honor, he could never believe it.

This is one reason why the SCA has such a horrible reputation with professional historians and antiquarians.

Robin of Gilwell / Jay Rudin

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