In 1994, Bill Gates purchased Leonardo da Vinci’s “Codex Leicester,” a manuscript that dates back to the 16th century. He paid $30.8 million for the journal at auction, a price that made it the most expensive book ever sold.
Gates has put the notebook out on loan to select museums this summer. The book value is currently estimated at $49.4 million.
The codex provides an insight into the link between art and science and the so-called creativity of scientific process. It was written in Italian language and spans 18 sheets.
The purchase caused all kinds of conspiracy theories
Bill Gates said he purchased Codex Leicester to share Leonardo’s sense of wonder and curiosity with the world. The codes from codex were scanned into digital image files. Some of the images were used as a screensaver and wallpaper for the Windows 95 desktop theme.
Despite these facts, not all people believe in the humanitarian purposes of Bill Gates. Those prone to conspiracy theories think he bought the codex because of the incoming AI. They believe that Leonardo’s scriptures and drawings from the book contain secrets that can be only deciphered by highly advanced artificial intelligence. And the result of deciphering could be the elixir of eternal youth or even immortality. The conspiracy theorists claim that the public didn’t get the right version of Codex’s pages but the modified one. Some even claim that screensavers and wallpapers were used for a special type of hypnosis.
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Good to know and thanks for the information. Let me add something else, somehow related to the same idea:
The rarest book in the world is a 1593 first edition of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare. The Bodleian’s copy “is the only known copy of this book in existence.”