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Gutenberg Bible
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Price: $80.00
Sale Price: $75.00
The Gutenberg Bible – the first major work printed in Europe – takes its name from Johann Gutenberg, a native of Mainz, Germany, who began experimenting with casting movable or reusable type in the 1440s. By about 1450 he had perfected a technique that allowed him to produce enough type to print small grammars and other ephemeral works, and soon afterward he began work on a full Bible. With financial backing from Johann Fust, a wealthy Mainz lawyer, Gutenberg and his workmen produced some 160 or 180 copies of the large folio Bible; about a quarter of the total were printed on vellum (fine parchment made from calfskin) and the remainder on paper imported from northern Italy.
We know that the Bible was finished by March 1455, when Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, described it in a letter to a friend, saying that the script was large and easily read even without glasses. Each copy consists of nearly 1,300 pages, measuring approximately 16 by 12 inches (400 x 300 mm). Most of the Bibles were bound by their first owners in two volumes, but in the early sixteenth century the copy now in the Library of Congress received a new binding of pigskin over wooden boards, and at that time it was divided into three volumes.
The Library of Congress Gutenberg Bible is one of three perfect examples printed on vellum that are known today; the others are at the British Library and at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In all, forty-eight more or less complete copies of the Bible survived into the twentieth century, although two of these – both very imperfect – were later wholly or partially disassembled and marketed as single leaves or individual books. A few Gutenberg Bibles have never strayed far from the libraries of their original monastic purchasers, but the majority are now housed in the large research libraries of Western Europe and America. Within recent years two copies that disappeared from Leipzig at the end of World War II have surfaced in Russia, and another – consisting of a single volume only – was acquired by a Japanese library in 1996.
The earliest owners of the Bible now in Washington were the Benedictine monks of St. Blasius, in Germany’s Black Forest, who acquired it soon after it was printed and kept it in their monastery until the French Revolution. In 1768 the monastery burned to the ground, the Bible and other books narrowly escaping by being thrown out the library window. During the Napoleonic era, as French troops advanced eastward over the Rhine, the monks moved the Bible to a Benedictine abbey in Einsiedeln, Switzerland. Shortly thereafter it, too, became unsafe, and the monks fled across the Alps to another cloister on Mt. Pyhrn in Austria. In 1809 the friars found safe haven at the abbey of St. Paul, where the Bible stayed for over a hundred years.
Following World War I, the abbey became desperate for funds and in 1926 sold the Bible to Otto H.F. Vollbehr. Vollbehr’s collection was brought to the attention of the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, in 1929. The Bible, along with 3,000 other incunables, was obtained in 1930, creating the foundation for the nation’s collection of fifteenth-century books. Even though the country was in the depths of the Great Depression, Congress readily appropriated the funds when Putnam requested $1.5 million for the purchase of the book.
Today the Gutenberg Bible is on permanent display in the Great Hall of the Library, and is seen by about one million visitors each year.
Features:
-Commentary by Janet Ing Freeman, Gutenberg
scholar
-Searchable, cross-linked English translation of
the Latin text, edited by David Sullivan for Octavo
-Magnify up to 200%
Specifications:
-Digital images of every page of this rare
book, cover to cover, in full color, presented as uncropped spreads
-Print and Thumbnails files for creating printed
references
-PDF file on CD-ROM with all of Adobe Reader’s
viewing, navigation, and search features
-Octavo Digital Guide and Help files
Requirements:
- Adobe Reader 5.0 or later
- Windows PC with Pentium processor running Windows 95 or later
- Macintosh Power Mac running OS 9.2, or OS X 10.1 or later. Linux 2.2 kernel on X86 computer
- Color Monitor (15" or larger, capable of displaying millions of colors recommended)
- CD-ROM drive
The original books imaged for this digital edition: Volumes One and Two: 15 3/4 x 11 3/8 inches (400 x 289 mm) Volume Three: 15 7/8 x 11 3/8 inches (403 x 289 mm)
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