"Thou art to pass over Jordan this day": a leaf from the 42-line Gutenberg-Bible - the first book ever printed from movable type

[Biblia latina - VT]. Gutenberg, Johannes (ed.). A leaf from the B-42 Gutenberg Bible.

€ 145,000.00

A leaf from the first book ever printed from movable type in the Western world. This part of the Fifth Book of Moses contains the Lord's assurance that Israel is to have the Promised Land and recalls the revelation of the Ten Commandments. It also includes the command to His chosen people, famously described as "stiffnecked", to remake the Tablets of Stone and build the Ark of the Covenant:

"Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself ... The Lord spake unto me, saying, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people ... So I turned and came down from the mount, ... and the two tables of the covenant were in my two hands ... And I took the two tables, and cast them out of my two hands, and brake them before your eyes ... At that time the Lord said unto me, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and come up unto me into the mount, and make thee an ark of wood. And I will write on the tables the words that were in the first tables which thou brakest, and thou shalt put them in the ark ... And he wrote on the tables, according to the first writing, the ten commandments, which the Lord spake unto you ...".

The Gutenberg Bible, also known as the B-42 in reference to the number of lines per column, was produced between the years 1450 and 1455 under the partnership of Johannes Gutenberg and his financial backer Johann Fust in approximately 180 copies - 150 on paper, 30 on vellum. Today, only 49 copies survive more or less substantially complete. Gutenberg's craftsmanship set standards "in quality of paper and blackness of ink, in design and professional skill, which the printers of later generations have found difficult to maintain; it is only in legibility of type that they have been able to improve on this, the first and in many ways the greatest of all printed books" (PMM). So rare is the B-42 that the slightest fragment is treasured, and the owner of even a single leaf will find himself in august company: of the 82 known holdings that are listed in the exhaustive Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, no fewer than 24 comprise just a single leaf or even fragments thereof; several other institutions hold two to four leaves.

This leaf originates from a severely defective copy formerly in the collection of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria and the Palatinate. It was subsequently housed in the Bavarian Royal Library, from which it was purchased as a duplicate by the English traveller and diplomat Robert Curzon in 1832. In 1920 the volume was returned to the trade and acquired by the American bookseller Gabriel Wells, then dispersed as single leaves or larger fragments, intended for universities and schools as well as for private collectors. The individual leaves were mostly accompanied by a printed essay by the Philadelphia bibliophile A. Edward Newton, as here. Regarding the penwork decoration of this copy, Eric White notes: "The Noble Fragments are identifiable by their neatly executed alternating red and blue lombard headlines, smaller initials and chapter numerals. These were the work of a skilled artisan, probably working in Mainz, who also rubricated the Gutenberg Bible now at the Rylands Library in Manchester.”