Antique Bibles
From Donation Bin to Sotheby's: How a Rare 19th-Century Bible Almost Got Away
By Ben Marks — On his first day as a volunteer for the Friends of Knight Memorial Library, in March of 2014, John Marks (no relation) was asked to help finalize prices for 200 books and sets that had been selected and pre-priced for one of the library’s twice-annual, vintage-book sales. One of these was a five-volume, 19th-century Torah, grandly titled “The Law of God” and edited and translated by Isaac Leeser. The publication date was listed as 5605 in the Jewish calendar, which in the Gregorian calendar...
Naughty Nuns, Flatulent Monks, and Other Surprises of Sacred Medieval Manuscripts
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Flipping through an illustrated manuscript from the 13th century, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Jesus loved a good fart joke. That's because the margins of these handmade devotional books were filled with imagery depicting everything from scatological humor to mythical beasts to sexually explicit satire. Though we may still get a kick out of poop jokes, we aren't used to seeing them visualized in such lurid detail, and certainly not in holy books. But in medieval Europe, before books...
Storybook Apocalypse: Beasts, Comets, and Other Signs of the End Times
By Ben Marks — It’s tempting to dismiss the mid-16th-century depictions of Biblical miracles, flaming comets, multi-headed beasts, and apocalyptic chaos that fill the pages of the “Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs” as the superstitious vestiges of the post-Medieval mind. But according to the co-authors of Taschen’s new, 568-page boxed volume called “Book of Miracles,” the Protestant citizens of Augsburg, Germany, were enthusiastic and active collectors of portrayals of portentous signs, as well as written...
The Last Word on First Editions
By Ben Marks — Strictly speaking, a book’s edition refers to the setting of the text. So the first time you set the text and print a book with it, and then sell a bound book that you’ve just printed, that’s the first edition, first printing. If you use the same setup of text and print it again, that would be the second printing—a printing is therefore a subclass of an edition. The printing is also called the impression, as in first or second impression. In general, the first edition, first printing...
To Catch A Thief: A Rare Book Expert on His Literary Obsessions
By Maribeth Keane and Anne Galloway — I don’t remember a time when I didn’t read books. In grade school, I devoured library books. I also loved comic books, and was wheeling and dealing them as a child—buying them for a nickel, sell them for dime. Bertrand Smith let me into the rare book room, and I bought a Maxwell Parrish "Arabian Nights." I bought an just for the illustrations. At the time I had no idea the artist was a Welsh woman named Gwynedd Hudson. Turns out she only illustrated two books—Alice and Peter Pan. I fell...
Bible Boxes Were Also Desks
By Thomas Hamilton Ormsbee — "I must write rudely," stated Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts Bay colony in a letter to the Countess of Lincoln in the year 1631, "having no table, or other room to write in than by the fireside upon my knee, in this sharp winter; to which my family must have leave to resorte, though they break good manners and make me many times forget what I would say and say what I would not." As he wrote this, less than a year had elapsed since the first sizable group of Puritans had arrived from...