The Codex Leicester is not nearly as famous as artworks such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. I was supposed to change the name from Codex Hammer (the previous owner was the industrialist Armand Hammer) to Codex Gates, but I thought that sounded silly and I changed the name back to Codex Leicester, the name it held from 1719 until 1980. The notebook in question was one of the 32 surviving journals of Leonardo da Vinci.Īfter I won the bid, I broke a longstanding tradition. And by “old-fashioned,” I meant really old-fashioned, as in more than 500 years old. I explained that by “notebook,” I meant the old-fashioned kind.
“Don’t you already have a great portable computer?” she asked.
Shortly after Melinda and I got married, I told her I was bidding on a notebook that could wind up costing a lot of money.
