The Search for the Codex Cardona

By: Arnold L. Bauer

Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld

Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

In The Search for the Codex Cardona, Arnold J. Bauer tells the story of his experiences on the trail of a cultural treasure, a Mexican “painted book” that first came into public view at Sotheby’s auction house in London in 1982, nearly 400 years after it was presumably made by Mexican artists and scribes. On folios of amate paper, the Codex includes two oversized maps and 300 painted illustrations accompanied by text in 16-century paleography. The Codex relates the trajectory of the Nahua people to the founding of the capital of Tenochtitln and then focuses on the consequences of the Spanish conquest up to the 1550s. If authentic, the Codex Cardona is an invaluable record of early Mexico. Yet there is no clear evidence of its origin, what happened to it after 1560, or even where it is today, after its last known appearance at Christie’s auction house in New York in 1998.

Bauer first saw the Codex Cardona in 1985 in the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, where scholars from Stanford and the University of California were attempting to establish its authenticity. Allowed to gently lift a few pages of this ancient treasure, Bauer was hooked. By 1986, the Codex had again disappeared from public view. Bauer’s curiosity about the Codex and its whereabouts led him down many forking paths - from California to Seville and Mexico City, to the Firestone Library in Princeton, to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Christie’s in New York - and it brought him in contact with an international cast of curators, agents, charlatans, and erudite book dealers. The Search for the Codex Cardona is a mystery that touches on issues of cultural patrimony, the workings of the rare books and manuscripts trade, the uncertainty of archives and evidence, and the ephemerality of the past and its remains.

©2009 Arnold L. Bauer (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

A Real-Life Indiana Jones Meets The Da Vinci Code

A real-life Indiana Jones story, "The Search for the Codex Cardona" is a global mystery with tantalizing clues, disconnected numbers, dead ends— the works.

The Codex Cardona, if found, would be an invaluable painted book of early Mexico. Lost for four hundred years, it resurfaced at a Sotheby’s auction. The author got a brief look at it and even got to hold some of the pages before it went underground again. The search was on!

A breathtaking tale that satisfied both my scholarly interest and taste for adventure.

I wish it were everything it hoped to be.

A great idea for a book, a good deal of scholarship, but thin on facts. What's worse is that when he runs out of facts he starts constructing an imagined story of the way the codex came to its current location and owner. While he explicitly states that he is imagining these details, it makes the actual history seem less important and more hollow. About half way through it seems there simply isn't enough for a book.