The value of information
The $21.3 million Magna Carta
How far the dissemination of information has come was brought home powerfully by a recent New York Times magazine article about the auction of a copy — not the original, a copy — of the Magna Carta. You'll remember from your high school history that the Magna Carta was an English charter from 1215 that was the historical first step for the establishment of a rule of law and democratic society.
This particular 15-by-17-inch piece of parchment from 1297 was sold at Sotheby's for more than $21 million. (Its previous purchaser, Texas billionaire Ross Perot, paid $1.5 million for it. Shows why he's a billionaire.)
The article goes on about the nature of "historicity" adding value to relics, but one paragraph by the author, James Gleick, stood out in noting that even at a time when all information is perceived as being free, some remains extremely valuable: "In one way, the Magna Carta is already yours for the asking: you can read it anytime, at the touch of a button. It has been preserved, photographically and digitally, in countless copies with no evident physical reality, which will nonetheless last as long as our civilization."
Back when this copy was made, he notes, the creation of parchment required the soaking, stretching, scraping and drying of sheepskin to make vellum, making ink from oak galls, and painstaking penmanship by scribes with quill pens. These copies would be dispatched to country churches and county seats to be read aloud to the populace, who were largely illiterate.
It continuously amazes me what arcane information can be accessed instantaneously these days — all within the past 20 years since the creation of the Web. And yet there is so much more that could be online, including all government documents. If you can access the Magna Carta, you should be able to access anything.
By the way, the guy who bought the copy was David Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group investment firm, who is worth about $2.5 billion himself. He plans to return it to public view at the National Archives, where it has been on display.