The Kargopol Museum’s collection includes an old book that once excited the world community. The book’s hardcover shows traces of sand, small shells and pieces of leather. The greenish pages have water stains all over them as if the book had been lying on the seashore for a long time. The title page in German reads, “The diary of Christopher Columbus written in my own hand for my son Diego on August 3, 1492”.

The news of the discovery was immediately received abroad, and the museum began to receive numerous inquiries: many experts wanted to know if the original Diary of Columbus had indeed been found. Those telegrams have been preserved in the funds — most probably, they remained unanswered.

At that time, the only thing known about the book was that it came from the collection of Kapiton Kolpakov. There was a version that Alexander Baranov, a merchant of Kargopol and the main ruler of Russian settlements in North America, could have been involved in the appearance of “The Diary” in Kargopol. This, however, was never proved, so the interest in this story subsided.

Half a century later, other journalists tried to resolve the mystery. It was Dmitry Dyomin who succeeded. At first, studying only the slide images, he thought that the book was handwritten. But during the research, Dyomin noticed that the white cardboard title page had a clumsily written inscription: “C. M. Seyppel. Felix Bagel Publishing House. Dusseldorf”. He then decided to check the information about a similar printed publication in the Union Catalog of American Libraries. There he found the author of the book, Carl Seyppel, with a reference to “The Diary”, “The color and appearance of paper and binding imitate those of a book damaged by seawater. The publisher’s imprint is on a separate piece of cardboard. Published in 1890.” The diary turned out to be not a fake or a hoax but simply a practical joke by a talented artist and writer.

Later, the story of how the book ended up in the museum was revealed from the notes of the Solovetsky camp doctor, published in the book “Treasures of the Gulag”. The prisoners trusted the doctor with their innermost secrets, and one day a prisoner from Kargopol told him about the book.

It turned out that the first owner of the publication was a local rural psalm reader. Once he ran away from home and became a sailor. In one of his travels, he bought a book in a second-hand bookseller’s shop in Hamburg. The man learned German and read the book in moments of rest. He could even reproduce some lines from memory. The sailor returned to Kargopol on the eve of the revolution and, anticipating his arrest, left his favorite thing to Kapiton Kolpakov for safekeeping.