New Manual Acquisition Project

[Michael Chidester]

Greetings, all.

With the partial failure of the last manual acquisition project project over a year ago (something I still hope to make good on some day) and the fact that nearly all of the illustrated manuscripts are now available, at that time I swore off trying to organize this sort of thing again. However, I'm currently involved in research and analysis around a group of manuscripts epitomized by Ludwig von Eyb's treatise of ca. 1510 and find that it might be advantageous to try one more. These treatises are known among students of Fiore dei Liberi as being Germanic spin-offs of his writings, though I hope to disprove this proposition when I finish my work, but less well-known among German enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, neither Eyb's Ms. B.26 nor the related ONB Codex 5278 are currently available in color scans, and the 5278 is not even available in a complete set of black and white scans (only about 2/3 of it are currently available, and most of the longsword is among the missing pages). I've been in touch with the Erlangen University Library (UBE) and the Austrian National Library (ONB), and they are both willing to sell me scans for quite reasonable prices--the total bill for both should come to about €199 (~$255) plus postage and packing, which seems very achievable with even a small number of contributors. If I can get fourteen or fifteen folks to contribute, the bill should go down to $20 each (or less!) which is much cheaper than previous projects.

In exchange, I'll send you the following:

• Color scans of the MS B.26, ff 16r - 61v
• Color scans of the Codex 5278, ff 174r - 203r
• High-res color scans of the Codex 10799, which I'll throw in because most people haven't had the patience to download them image-by-image as I did

A few of you have already contacted me to express interest, but please respond again now that the terms are laid out. The final price will be set once I know how many people are participating. I should also point out that this is a strictly private venture--I will not be making these scans available online on the Wiktenauer or elsewhere for at least the foreseeable future.

If you know any Fiore practitioners who might be interested in participating--my connections in that side of the community are weak--feel free to invite them to contact me.

Cheers.

[admin]

I'll happily send 20 bucks by paypal

[the_last_alive]

I'll happily send 20 bucks by paypal

Ditto.

[Michael Chidester]

PM me with your email addresses and I'll add you to the list.

[Reinier]

Could I convince you to also put colour scans of Vault Case MS Fol.U.423.792 from the Newberry in the acquisition project?

Regardless, I will check my finances this weekend

R

[Jeremy S.]

Sounds like something I need to get in on!

[Michael Chidester]

Time for the first update on this endeavor. I have just received the invoice from the Universitatsbibliothek Erlangen, which came out to precisely what I expected it to be but reminded me of a hidden cost in all this. European museums tend to want the money wired to them, and my previous bank charged something on the order of $50 per international wire transfer, and this in turn inflated the overall cost of the acquisition quite a bit.

Therefore, if any of you have the option of sending a wire transfer for free or for a negligible cost that you are willing to absorb (perhaps because you work in banking, I don't know), then I will waive the cost of participation in exchange for your assistance. Once I have collected the funds, I will transfer them to you (via paypal) as well as the proper reference numbers for the invoices and let you handle it. If you can do this for just one of the two transfers (one is going to Austria, the other to Germany), I will waive the cost.

I can make this offer because as things currently stand, we're already nearly at the threshold for bringing the individual cost down to $20 a head, so I'm no longer concerned that we won't have enough interest to make this financially workable. The final determination of price will be made based on the number of pledged participants that we have when I receive the invoice from the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek.

[Michael Chidester]

As a caveat to the last post, EU nations enjoy extremely low wire transfer fees inside the Eurozone, so if you live in one of those countries and don't know what your wire transfer fee is, you might want to check.

[Payson]

We can do it. I emailed you some details.

[Joeli]

I'll be happy to contribute. And thanks for all the work you have done with the treatises.

[Michael Chidester]

Thanks. So everyone knows, the wire transfer issue has been resolved and so that opportunity is no longer available.

[Michael Chidester]

Just received the scans of the 5278, which are quite lovely though not, as I half-hoped, painted. There are no surprises waiting for those who've seen the 10799, but in reviewing them just now I noticed that there is quite a bit of writing on 199v, 201v, 202v, and 203v. It's probably unrelated to the fencing sketches, but it might not be. I wrote the museum and requested that scans of those pages be added to the order (being kindly folk, they sent the download link ahead of the invoice), and perhaps there's another discovery waiting to be made here.