Word: bodleian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Oscar Wilde sometimes complained of historians who had fallen into "careless habits of accuracy." He would have relished the work of the British recluse Edmund Backhouse, celebrated in his day (1873-1944) for his translations from the Chinese and his vast Sinological contributions to Oxford's Bodleian Library. The Backhouse oeuvre is filled with an amalgam of profound insight, scholarship and, it now appears, pornography; all it lacks is a single component: truth...
...Toronto, in files of U.S. and British companies. The exposé searched for an aberrant scholar and turned up a consummate rogue. Trapped by bad debts, Backhouse had dropped out of Oxford. In 1898 he showed up in China with faked references; 15 years later he shipped the Bodleian some 17,000 volumes of chinoiserie; later he contributed 18 manuscripts that were blatant forgeries and promised other treasures that did not exist. During World War I, as a sub rosa operative, he embroiled high British officials and even the King in a plot to procure from neutral China at least...
Some of these volumes are still extant, in the Bodleian, in the British Museum, in the Bibliotheque Nationale; secured with chains, too ponderous to cradle in a lap, original editions of Aquinas and Sir Thomas Browne, various Bibles and historical chronicles, lie open on high oaken tables or under glass. Their pages emanate the same subtle dust observable on the wings of a moth beneath a lamp. In the Founder's Library at New College stand row upon row of thick Latin treatises bound in ivory. And as I look through the notices in TLS of Sotheby's auctions...