Word: manuscripts
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...catalog entry particularly caught his eye: A manuscript entitled “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” a fictional novel purportedly handwritten in the 1850s by an escaped female slave named Hannah Crafts...
Gates’s acquisition of the manuscript has stirred wide interest in the work even though at the time of the auction, few others believed the document was really written by an escaped slave...
According to Gates, the publishing houses declined to support his efforts financially for the same reason that he faced no bidding opposition: Nobody had verified the authenticity of the work. The problem, however, lay in the fact that he could not prove the manuscript was legitimate until after he had purchased...
After the acquisition, Gates began the arduous process of authenticating the manuscript. He explained that his verification process entailed “lining up” the events, times and places in the text and comparing them to known historical facts. If the purported origin of the text is genuine, the textual and factual details “will look like mirror images,” he said...
Gates says he has not yet decided where the original copy of the manuscript will eventually find a home...