Catalogue Entry: THEM00413

Rough drafts of some of the chapters of the work on the Prophecies (section 7.2h)

Author: Isaac Newton

Source: Yahuda Ms. 7.2h, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel

[Normalized Text] [Diplomatic Text]

Custodial History

SL245, described in the Sotheby catalogue as c. 300,000 words on 975 pp., was bought at the Sotheby sale by Gabriel Wells for £48 and sold to Yahuda on 1 Aug. 1936 for the sale price plus 15%. On 24 May 1949, Yahuda wrote to the London dealer Heinrich Eisemann, 'As to lot 245 the new arrangement and replacement of the pages resulted in 1,530 pages instead of 975 pages as many pages had to be taken out from other lots. But for this manuscript I have a customer who wants to pay a much higher price than $3,800 suggested by you.' If this was true, the prospective buyer's desire to part with his or her cash presumably waned. There must subsequently have been further reordering of the manuscript as the present Yahuda Ms. 7 amounts to nowhere near 1,530 pp.

Sotheby Lot

SL245 + ?

[1] The contents of this note are only visible in the diplomatic transcript because they were deleted on the original manuscript

[Editorial Note 1] The remaining material is written upside down from the bottom of the page.

© 2024 The Newton Project

Professor Rob Iliffe
Director, AHRC Newton Papers Project

Scott Mandelbrote,
Fellow & Perne librarian, Peterhouse, Cambridge

Faculty of History, George Street, Oxford, OX1 2RL - newtonproject@history.ox.ac.uk

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