HEART BREAK OF THE $100m blockbuster
Six centuries old, it’s the best-preserved Gutenberg Bible in the world. And its extraordinary history — sold to pay gambling debts and bought by a rich widow too blind to read it — is a thrilling page-turner
THe Gutenberg Bible, says Margaret Leslie Davis unequivocally, is ‘a masterpiece of world c u l t u r e . . . t h e most beautiful work of printing the world has ever known’.
Only 49 copies are known now to exist, and one edition, held by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, when put on display, is surrounded by armed guards, with drawn revolvers.
the Bibles were made in 1456 by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, for distribution to churches, convents and monasteries. Hitherto, sacred texts were painstakingly copied by scribes, a process that took years. Gutenberg’s innovation was to create a mechanical typeface that resembled traditional monkish calligraphy — and a Bible could be assembled in a few weeks.
the single alphabetical letters, carved from metal, were combined and recombined by hand to make ‘an everchanging stream of words’. the lines of words, punctuation marks and spaces were slotted and held in wooden frames, and the blocks of text were then inked and pressed on to the paper or vellum, which was first moistened, the better to hold the pigment.
the printing press was developed from an olive press, and the printer had to be able to arrange the type upside down and backwards, in columns of equal width. those of us who had a John Bull Printing Set as children will know the basic drill.
It was an advanced technical skill, and to this day the ink of a Gutenberg Bible ‘shimmers as if the pages were just recently printed’, we are assured.
the leaves are ‘as black and glossy as the hair of a Japanese beauty’. the original binding was of calfskin stretched over wooden boards. the margins of the Royal Folio pages, 16in tall by 12in wide, were decorated with elaborate, richly coloured illuminations, coils of flowers, animals and birds.
Copies began to appear on the open market after the French Revolution upended the religious establishments, a process exacerbated by the ‘chaos of war’ caused by Napoleon.
the first private owner of the Gutenberg Bible, whose fate is the one followed in Davis’s study, was the earl of Gosford, who paid £45 for it in 1836. english aristocrats saw books as trophies and status symbols. there was a fashion for ‘fancy hand-tooled bindings, coloured leather that looks good on the shelf’.
Gosford, a moody recluse, shipped thousands of rare volumes to his castle in Northern Ireland. His Gutenberg was placed in a library so cavernous that it required two men and a 40ft ladder to reach the top shelves.
Gosford died, aged 57, from ‘an attack of gout in the head’, and his son and heir, who was interested in the estate only for grouse shooting, liquidated the library in 1884 to cover his gambling debts.
the Bible was sold for £500 and went to Didlington Hall, Norfolk, the palatial home of Lord William tyssen-Amherst, who possessed ‘a bottomless hunger for the best the world has to offer’. the Hall, set in a 7,000-acre park, had ballrooms, 46 bedrooms, a suite for visiting royalty and a museum filled with antiquities.
the Bible was kept in a steel casket inside a fireproof vault — it was, for Amherst, ‘an unmatched bargain’.
then disaster struck. the family solicitor, having embezzled Amherst’s fortune, killed himself — at least £250,000 (about £30 million today) had been lost, and in 1908, the Gutenberg, along with everything else that had been collected, had to be sold off to make good the fraud. the Bible went for £2,050.
Six weeks later, Amherst dropped dead from shock and grief.
the book was purchased by Charles William Dyson Perrins, of the Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce empire, and displayed in his country house near Malvern. Perrins also owned the Royal Worcester Porcelain factory which, unlike the condiment concern, kept losing money. In the post-war period, to keep the china works going and pay the wages of a large staff, Perrins was forced to sell his library, for a total of £147,627.
On March 11, 1947, the Gutenberg was auctioned off yet again — this time for £ 22,000. the new owner, Sir Philip Beaumont Frere, a private collector, sold it almost immediately, for a £3,000 profit,
to Estelle Doheny, a widow whose late husband had left her oil wells worth $1.8 billion in today’s figures. the gutenberg Bible went by ship to America, disguised in a crate marked ‘commodes’.
ESTELLE, who enjoyed amassing prayer books and other early sacred texts, was overjoyed. ‘ the moment I saw the book in its wonderfully perfect condition, I felt as if I wanted to lift it up and kiss it.’
It is a sad irony that Estelle had advanced glaucoma, and could never actually read any of it.
she’d wanted her own copy of the gutenberg Bible since 1911, and was always outbid — hence Davis’s title, which refers to the way Estelle always ‘lost’ her chance. Finally, in october 1950, the book, ‘probably the finest copy known’, with no pages missing or defaced, arrived in Los Angeles, having been hastily inspected by New York customs officials.
the Bible was kept in a hidden room, away from dust, dirt, smoke or soot. Estelle died in 1958 and her treasures were left to the Edward Laurence Doheny Memorial Library at the st John’s seminary, in California.
Against what would have been her express wishes, however, and in a clear violation of ‘the spirit of Estelle’s bequest’, the library was closed down and everything dispersed in a sale in 1987.
A new corporate regime at the seminary saw the gutenberg and other manuscripts, and even the paintings on the walls, as ‘inert assets’. there was absolutely no interest in, or understanding of, the enlightened idea that art is what ‘lifts our gaze towards god’.
stupidity and philistinism prevailed, as it so often does. the committee now in charge wanted only ‘to maximise revenue for the church’, and the funds raised were used to redecorate the archbishop’s quarters. st John’s seminary now resembles a motorway service station, apparently.
the gutenberg Bible was sold to a company in tokyo for $5.4 million. A high-resolution photographic version was made and placed online. the original has been secured in an air-conditioned vault in total darkness with all access to it denied. scholars, ‘no matter how qualified,’ will never see it again — unless something radical happens, which, as we have seen, has always been the pattern with the book in the past.
Were it to come on the market today, its price would be in the $100 million range. to put it in perspective, my own complete works are available on Amazon for less than 10p, and contain more laughs.