Administrative ignorance, part whatevereth

From the Times of London:

Biblical error costs Church £½m
An historic collection of religious books whose sale for £36,000 was approved last year by a Church of England diocese has been sold on by a book dealer for more than £500,000....

“Those on the management committee had no idea of the value of the material they were dealing with. The decision was made in principle that the pre1800 collection be disposed of simply because in the past ten years no one had inquired about any book in it at all. Therefore, the library management committee felt that the space was being taken up in a way that was not productive....

In all fairness, though, this is preferable to the clueless managers simply tossing them in the rubbish skip. (That's British for "dumpster".) At least they made some effort to keep the books in existence, if not necessarily available to the world at large.