Lost Gutenberg

Davis, Margaret Leslie. Lost Gutenberg: The Astonishing Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey. New York: TarcherPerigee 2019. Print

First Sentences:

A wooden box containing one of the most valuable books in the world arrives in Los Angeles on October 14, 1950, with little more fanfare -- or security -- than a Sears catalog.

Code-named "the commode," it was flown from London via regular parcel post, and while it is being delivered locally by Tice and Lynce, a high-end customs broker and shipping company, its agents have no idea what they are carrying and take no special precautions. 

Description:

I suppose if you have no interest in the historic creation of the first book published with movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, there is no need to read any further in this review. For me, however, Margaret Leslie Davis' Lost Gutenberg: The Astonishing Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey, was a tremendously interesting history of a one specific Gutenberg Bible, its fabulously rich owners, and the quirks found inside this masterpieces of design, paper, binding, lettering, and illustration.

Printed around 1465, the Gutenberg Bible represented the first printing of a major book using metal movable type. Movable type had been used in China in the eleventh century, "but proved unwieldy, given the written language's thousands of distinct ideograms." Gutenberg developed the process of pouring liquid tin and lead into a mold to reproduce exact duplicates of each letter that could be arranged and re-arranged for printing, and even melted down later to create new letters. He created new tools necessary to actually print a book: frames to hold the type in place; presses that insure even pressure to push the paper down on the type on each page; and smear-proof, long-lasting ink. 

Gutenberg's inventions created a system that could print any number of books relatively quickly and cheaply, especially when compared to the alternative - hand-lettering each page. Before Gutenberg, a Bible might take two years to produce. With the constant demand for Bibles from monasteries, convents, and churches, Gutenberg made the business choice for his first movable type project to be the printing of the multi-volume,1,200-page Bible, "using 270 different characters -- punctuation as well as upper- and lowercase letters and letter combinations." 

Lost Gutenberg follows the life on one particular Bible, nicknamed "Number 45," and its owners throughout history. Lost Gutenberg also traces the huge fortunes of its world's ultra-rich owners who purchased, exhibited, or merely relegated Number 45 to massive shelves of a personal library, forgotten as just another expensive possession. Then there are the sadder stories of lost fortunes and the breaking up of world-class rare book collections for the owners of Number 45. 

Here are just a few of the facts I learned:

• Gutenberg Bibles still have bookplates from various owners pasted inside their front covers. (Seems to me like stamping "Property of.." on the Mona Lisa);
• Paper for printing was first moistened so it would absorb the ink better;
• There are 6-10 tiny holes in each page. Paper was "folded and pierced around the edges with a needle, providing guides so that the print would be impressed at exactly the same place on the front -- and back-- of each page";
• Even though the print lined up exactly on each side of the page, nineteen pages have one or two more lines than the standard 42 lines of text; 
• Some versions of the Bible had strips of velum extending beyond the pages to be used as thumb markers to index and allow faster access to specific sections.

Author Davis describes how, in 1980, new technology of lasers was used to study the composition of ink in Number 45. These lasers sent a data-gathering beam 1/10 the size of a period to help researchers understand how the 500-year-old ink still looked fresh. Researchers also found variations of ink between pages, demonstrating that printing was done on separate presses for different pages. Gutenberg had created the first assembly line. 

And today? At a 2015 auction, eight leaves (sixteen pages) from a Gutenberg sold for $970,000. Therefore "...each leaf of the Gutenberg Bible could be valued now at an extraordinary $121,250...it is conceivable that a two-volume Gutenberg Bible consisting of 643 leaves (1,286 single pages) might be priced at almost $80 million."

I could go on with more details about this particular Gutenberg Bible, but instead urge interested readers to grab onto The Lost Gutenberg to better immerse themselves in the history about this fascinating volume, "the world's most important book," its current fate and current fates other existing Gutenberg Bibles. 

The first mass-produced printed books, after all, are unlike any other thing in the world. Little else that we have produced is so rich with story, with lifelines that flow through one object -- and bind us together in the pages of human existence. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Mays, Andrea. The Millionaire and the Bard.   

This documents life of Henry Folger and his obsession with and quest to possess all existing copies of Shakespeare's original First Folios. Highly recommended (previously reviewed here)