![]() ![]() 96, offering it at a modest markup of £250 above the hammer price of £2,000.The purchaser was a Cambridge graduate, the London barrister Arthur William Young, who had matriculated at Trinity College in 1872. In the saleroom the Hopetoun Gutenberg Bible was bought by Bernard Quaritch, who in April featured it, with an unusually long description, in his Rough List no. Tom Hodge of Sotheby’s discovered it in a neglected cupboard as he was packing up the library for shipment to London. Neither he nor anyone else had any idea that the family library included a Gutenberg Bible. In February 1889, the year he sailed to Australia to assume the governorship of Victoria, Hope put the library’s rarities up for sale at Sotheby’s. ANTIQ.’ The Hopetoun books descended to John Hope, seventh Earl and subsequently Marquess of Linlithgow. When Hope acquired this Bible it would not have been thought of as the Gutenberg Bible, but only as an ancient printed Bible: as the spine labels put it, ‘BIBLIA LATINA EDIT. But there must be a kernel of truth, for a number of fine Hopetoun incunables have early Strasbourg provenances, especially of the old collegiate church, turned Protestant in the sixteenth century, of Saint-Pierre-le-jeune. It is more rumor than established fact that the young Charles Hope, granted a peerage in 1704, bought rare books from the Jesuit college in Strasbourg. One is a beautiful copy now at Lambeth Palace Library, of which only the New Testament is preserved the other vellum copy, illuminated in London, survives as a single leaf used as a binding wrapper, discovered in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century by John Bagford and now in the British Library.The next surviving copy that we know to have reached the British Isles is that acquired, at an uncertain date in the early eighteenth century, by Charles Hope (1681-1742), first Earl of Hopetoun, and first resident of the grandly constructed Hopetoun House in Linlithgowshire. Because copies were sent to the Low Countries, it is not surprising that at least two copies, both printed on vellum, made their way across the North Sea to England. The localizing features of illuminations and bindings, and various old ownership inscriptions, document that the Gutenberg Bible was sold widely outside the region of Mainz, with copies going to Southern Germany, Austria, Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and Spain. These features were typically supplied at the places where the various copies were sold, and not in the Mainz printing shop. ![]() If purchasers wanted to pay extra they could further commission illuminated initials and borders. Before they could be used, these Bible sheets had to be finished with hand rubrication supplying book, prologue and psalm tituli, initial letters, chapter numbers, and headlines and then had to be bound. Perhaps 180 copies were printed of this Latin Bible, available for purchase in either vellum copies (about a quarter of the edition run) or paper.Each purchaser received the sheets of an intrinsically two-volume work in what is called Royal folio format, with leaf dimensions of roughly 40-41 cm in height and 29 cm in width: 324 leaves for the first volume, 319 for the second. The Gutenberg Bible (better called Gutenberg-Fust Bible), the first large-scale production of the newly developed system of typographic printing, was completed in Mainz in 1455. Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Treasures of the Library : Gutenberg Bible Treasures of the Library.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.COVID-19 Portal While this global health crisis continues to evolve, it can be useful to look to past pandemics to better understand how to respond today.Student Portal Britannica is the ultimate student resource for key school subjects like history, government, literature, and more.This Time in History In these videos, find out what happened this month (or any month!) in history.#WTFact Videos In #WTFact Britannica shares some of the most bizarre facts we can find.Demystified Videos In Demystified, Britannica has all the answers to your burning questions.Britannica Classics Check out these retro videos from Encyclopedia Britannica’s archives.Britannica Explains In these videos, Britannica explains a variety of topics and answers frequently asked questions. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |