27-07-2017, 02:29 PM
Quote:Searcher made me see this old question again.
One ducat had 3.5 grams of gold, so 600 ducats are 2.1 kg of gold.
One can try to interpret the buying power of this over time.
Nowadays, this is around 90,000 US$ .
During Wilfrid's lifetime it was 1400 US$ (presently about 35,000 US$ through inflation).
Both amounts are not excessive for rare books.
When Kraus was asking over 100,000 dollars for the book, the above-mentioned amount of gold
was worth less than 2500 dollars.
This calculation does not take into account that the value of gold (in terms of its purchasing power) also changes over time, not only the value of money does (inflation). Around 1600 it was several times lower than today.
Quote:Rene, don't the examples you show in the first posts suggest that the VM would have been Rudolph's most expensive single book by a significant margin?
Technically, we don't know if the sum was paid for the VMS exclusively, or for a set of books containing the VMS among others. The Mnisovsky report is vague upon this.