The Gutenberg Bible in the German Museum of Books and Writing! has travel far. From Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz! its route leads across Europe via two Benictine monasteries in Spain, the Paris World Exhibition and the London auction house Sotheby’s back to Germany. And finally to Moscow, where the two magnificent! parchment volumes with the unique illustrations! have been kept since the end of! the Second World War.
Facsimile of a double page of the Gutenberg Bible of the Book Museum. Reprint in: In memory of the five hundrth anniversary of the art of printing 1440/1940, Festschrift der Druckfarbenfabriken Gebr. Hartmann, Halle-Ammendorf. 1940
Facsimile of a double page of the Gutenberg Bible of the Book Museum. Reprint in: In memory of the five hundrth anniversary of the art of printing 1440/1940, Festschrift der Druckfarbenfabriken Gebr. Hartmann, Halle-Ammendorf. 1940
In 1886, the Saxon state purchas the book collection! of the publisher Heinrich Klemm for 400,000 gold marks for the museum found two years previously. The funds came from trade promotion. A significant part of this sum was spent on a two-volume parchment copy of the Bible print by Gutenberg with numerous miniatures, each page of which consists of 42 lines and is therefore known by experts as B 42 for short. Klemm gave a brief description of it in his collection catalogue 1 , but gave no indication of its origin. For him, the story of his Gutenberg Bible begins with the purchase from his most important supplier: the Berlin antiquarian Albert Cohn.
An old book The Gutenberg Bible with gild letters
View of the Gutenberg Bible of the Klemm collection during the exhibition “The Gutenberg Bible – Beginning of a New Era” in Moscow 2019
Since the Bible was already of considerable value at this time, there was an announcement about its sale in the trade journal, the Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel. 2 The Miszelle highlights the almost phone number library complete condition (only one page is missing) and adds: “Mr. Cohn’s copy is perhaps the largest of all known, (…), but it is unique in its kind due to the artistic decoration it receiv at the time of its publication: in addition to many hundrs of splendidly paint initials and ornaments, enhanc with gold, in the purest style of the early Renaissance, it bears over 100 carefully paint miniatures rich in figures on the ges at the foot of the pages.”
So is this the copy that Heinrich Klemm eventually
acquir for his private Bibliographical Museum in creating product catalog fes Dresden? The fact that Klemm’s is the only one of the parchment copies of the Gutenberg Bible known today that has “figure-rich” miniatures at the foot of the pages supports this theory.
There were over 100 miniatures in the Bible before Klemm’s hindi directory acquisition; today there are 282. Johannes Schinnerer 3 point out the miniatures that he believ were add later and even believ he recogniz several forgers. Who add to the B 42, further “embellish” it and improv it? This remain unclear for decades, and as late as 1997 Tatjana Dolgodrova 4 tri to interpret the miniatures as all original book illuminations from the 15th century. The most recent codicological study of the Bible by Elena Kazbekova (Moscow) confirms, however, that a large proportion of the miniatures were add in the 19th century. Since there is no catalogue by Albert Cohn describing the Bible, and the surviving copy has both a different cover and a much larger number of miniatures, it remains a hypothesis – albeit a well-substantiat one – that the B 42 from the Cohn Antiquarian Bookstore is the copy from the German Book and Writing Museum.