Posted on October 31, 2022 at 12:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
What do you give as a gift to the head of one of the largest churches in the world?
If you're French President Emmanuel Macron, you choose an extremely rare and valuable book for Pope Francis ... and then probably wish you hadn't.
Reuters reports that when news broke about the first-edition 1796 French translation of Immanuel Kant's Towards Perpetual Peace, online speculation immediately centered on a stamp on the title page.
That stamp came from a university library in the city of Lviv — now in Ukraine, but formerly in Poland, which prompted accusations that the book had been stolen by Nazis during World War II.
The book dealer who sold the item, however, disputes this allegation, saying that a label in the book puts it firmly in Paris before World War II, and Poland's culture minister tweeted in support of his argument.
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Categories: Today in Books