Published: 16 December 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
A century ago, a New York bookseller caused a sensation by selling his Gutenberg Bible, leaf by leaf. The bookseller was also a distant relative of mine and his gamble helped resurrect my family when they arrived in Sydney from Hungary.
For a bibliophile, books are sacred objects to be treasured and protected. Of all the sacred books in this world, perhaps the most famous is the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed in Europe using mass-produced movable metal type.
First published in 1455, only 180 copies were printed. Is there anything more sacrilegious than tearing the pages from a Gutenberg Bible?
Yet one hundred years ago a famous New York antiquarian bookseller chose precisely this course of action to maximise the potential sales on his investment in a damaged copy of the Bible.
The bookseller’s name was Gabriel Wells, whose purchases included a Gutenberg Bible which was missing more than 50 of the usual 541 leaves. In 1921 Wells decided to sell each page as a “Noble Fragment”, a brazen act that ensured his everlasting notoriety in the world of bibliophiles, some of whom continue to revile him.
“That bastard Gabriel Wells broke his up into individual leaves; with, of course, the book breaker’s invariable whine that it was “damaged” because it was missing 53 leaves; missing only 53 leaves meant that it was one of the most complete surviving copies. Until he got his claws on it,” wrote a contributor to an American bibliophile site. (Thomas Conroy, The Peachey Conservation)
I am, however, more warmly disposed towards “that bastard” after discovering a few years ago, that Wells was a distant relative whose disposal of the “disseverated” (his adjective) Gutenberg helped build a small fortune that underwrote my own family’s destiny when they moved to Sydney after fleeing post-war Europe.
It was a connection that only emerged when I started digging into our family history during Covid lockdown. The one glaring void in the story was my grandfather's second wife, a woman who seemed to have been erased from our family – but who emerged as the crucial link between the Gutenberg Bible and the Visontay family’s resurrection in Kings Cross.
