In the decades around the French Revolution, Europe's monasteries were dissolved and their libraries scattered, and English collectors bought up the rarest books for fortunes. In 1790 the London bookseller Thomas Payne sold the Gutenberg Bible to Earl Spencer for £370, a huge sum at the time, and rebound it in blue goatskin, removing the marks that showed it had belonged to the Augustinian friars of Colmar. Multispectral imaging now recovers those erased inscriptions. Revolutionary France had declared church property the nation's in 1789, and the Napoleonic wars did the same across much of Europe. Many of the books that became the foundation of Anglophone research libraries came from this forced sale.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.