On a recent trip to the Big Apple, walking down Madison Avenue, I was drawn into Bauman Rare Books flagship gallery. My jaw dropped at the prices of First Editions of literary classics---James Joyce’s Ulysses, offered at $65,000, E. B White’s Charlotte’s Web, at $4,000. Formidable prices indeed but pale in contrast with the price of The Gutenberg Bible, complete editions ---of which only 21 exist of the original 180—currently valued upwards of $35,000,000. Multi-leaf ‘fragments’ fetch around $1,000,000.

In a new and fascinating work titled Noble Fragments, author Michael Visontay writes a gripping tale that chronicles the sales and trades of Gutenberg Bibles. A book certain to engage true believers and skeptics alike. At the center of the story is European antiquarian bookdealer Gabriel Wells. In 1921, Wells fled Hungary, ignobly, ahead of creditors and family responsibilities. Fluent in eight foreign languages, Wells became a tutor at Harvard before embarking on his career in antique bookselling. A fast learner, Wells rose rapidly in this arcane, competitive business in which transactions were made with the ultra-well-heeled and powerful on both sides of the Atlantic. But how did Wells come in possession of a treasure such as a Gutenberg Bible?

Wells acquired an edition of the so-called “Mannheim Bible” through Frank Sabin, a London –based rare bookdealer. It was however, notably incomplete, lacking 53 of its original 643 leaves, with several others damaged or flawed. Wells was no collector---he was a calculating dealer who disassembled his Gutenberg Bible then sumptuously rebound the fragments in opulent leather covers. Then he sold these leaf by leaf or for those who could afford it a combination of leaves. Wells engineered an enormous personal profit but he simultaneously generated diametrically contrary opinions from the literary cognoscenti. The very scholarly condemned Wells as a despicable immoral rascal. Countless others, however, commended his action which enabled these treasures to be enjoyed by a grateful range of devotees of significant literature.

Though any leaf of a Gutenberg Bible is valuable, both multiple-leaf and single-leaf “fragments” were, and continue to be, highly desirable --- Exodus and Deuteronomy versions of ‘The Ten Commandments’ are primary examples, the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, equally so.

The jury is still out on the ethics employed by Wells vis-à-vis dismantling a sacred document and its for-profit sales. However no one disputes the importance of the printing and the wide distribution of the Gutenberg Bible “supercharged the advance of human knowledge and learning” at warp speed when it was first printed in 1455. Of course in Latin.