LightGramsJuly 10, 2025Volume 29, Number 21 Harvard University has collections of historical documents. One notable group is nearly 30 copies of the Magna Carta. One copy was purchased in 1946 for $27.50 from Sotheby’s in London. It was considered to be a “sheriff’s copy” of the document, interesting, but not nearly as valuable as an…
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LightGramsFebruary 6, 2025Volume 29, Number 6 Dan Martin’s job as a summer intern was simple: Go through the boxes of old movie reels that had been donated to Lauro’s Historic Films Archive, and catalog the various titles. We can imagine that is a tedious and somewhat boring job, but one day he struck gold! He…
LightGramsFebruary 15, 2024Volume 28, Number 4 Rick Trojanowski placed the winning bid on an old toolbox back in 2017. He was at a farm auction at the time and didn’t take time to look through his new acquisition for a couple of years. Tucked away in a drawer of the toolbox was a love letter…
LightGramsJune 8, 2023Volume 27, Number 15 An auction took place last month in New York at Sotheby’s, an agency famed for auctioning rare and valuable objects. When the closing gavel fell only six minutes into the bidding, the Codex Sassoon had sold for $33.5 million. That put this codex among the highest-selling objects of all…
LightGramsJanuary 5, 2023Volume 27, Number 1 A December 30, 2022 article published by the Associate Press noted that several significant literary and musical works would officially enter the public domain on January 1, 2023. Among the works was the last Sherlock Holmes mystery, works by Agatha Christie, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Entering…
LightGrams July 30, 2020 Volume 24, Number 26 There was a heist at an art gallery in Tokyo, Japan earlier this month. Everything on display was taken; not an item was left. All this happened as police stood outside to monitor the large crowd that had gathered. What we’re describing was the “Stealable Art Exhibition”.…
LightGrams July 2, 2020 Volume 24, Number 22 I rarely step outside of my house without my smart phone in my pocket. I believe there are many others who do the same. Why do we do it? Simply because this tool is so versatile. As we’ve often heard it described, “There’s an app for that.”…
LightGrams February 6, 2020 Volume 24, Number 5 If your job is to run a web site to attract tourists to your city, what do you highlight? Highly-rated restaurants? Beautiful local scenery? High crime rates? Lots of things to do? Wait – rewind a bit – “high crime rates”?! Is that any way to attract…
LightGrams October 17, 2019 Volume 23, Number 33 One feature of the vehicle I drive is a glove compartment. I’ll have to confess, however, that there are no gloves in that compartment. Neither will you find what used to be a necessity in years gone by – maps. My navigation now comes from either a…
LightGrams July 18, 2019 Volume 23, Number 26 Three things stood out to Kim Draper as she looked at the envelope left in her mailbox. The most obvious was that it was addressed to someone else; but then she saw that the address was for the house in which she lives. The second fact was…