From The Art Newspaper:
More than 600 books, among them 11 valuable medieval manuscripts, are to return to the University and Regional Library of Bonn in a ceremony today, more than 70 years after they disappeared in the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War.
About 150 of the most valuable of
the books were discovered when they were offered to Sotheby’s for auction by a Belgian woman who had inherited them from her father. When they arrived in London for inspection, the auction house’s experts noticed that many of the bindings had been removed, library stamps had been erased and title pages destroyed.
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Specialists at the auction house matched the books with the Bonn library’s meticulous inventory of losses recording some of the 180,000 volumes missing since the Second World War and contacted the library.