U.S. agents recover letter by Columbus

WILMINGTON, Del. — Federal agents in Delaware have recovered a more than 500-year-old copy of a letter penned by Christopher Columbus that vanished from an Italian library decades ago.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware and Homeland Security investigators, who specialize in the recovery of stolen rare books and historic artifacts, announced the find on Wednesday. The letter is one of a few dozen authentic, reprinted copies of Columbus’ original letter, which was handwritten in Spanish in April 1493 and almost immediately reprinted in Latin by the Rome printer Stephan Plannck.

It’s the fourth such return in recent years after U.S. investigators, tipped off by a rare-books expert, determined that several authentic copies of the Columbus letter had been stolen from libraries across Europe without library officials’ knowledge. Investigators called this latest find — “Columbus Letter Plannck I,” which tells of Columbus’ discoveries in the Americas — the most rare of the four.

The letter, which is valued at up to $1.3 million, was found in the hands of an unidentified private collector and ordered returned to the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, Italy, the U.S. attorney’s office said. Federal investigators, working with the Italian Carabinieri Command for Protection of Cultural Heritage, determined that the collector was “acting in good faith” in buying the letter from a rare-book dealer in the United States in 2003.

Plannck’s first edition of the letter, which Columbus addressed just to King Ferdinand of Spain, is exceptionally rare, the U.S. attorney’s office statement explained. Plannck also printed a second edition of a letter Columbus penned to both Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. They were published to spread the news of Columbus’ discoveries in the 1400s.

The Venetian library acquired a copy of Plannck’s first edition around 1875, and investigators think it was stolen from the library more than 100 years later, in the 1980s, the U.S. attorney’s office said. Unlike other thefts of Plannck’s printed copies, this letter wasn’t replaced with a forgery.

Investigators finally located the stolen first edition last year. The buyer agreed to have it inspected by Paul Needham, a rare-book expert at Princeton University.