FIRST PRINTED BOOK

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1788, 29 July 1926, Page 2

FIRST PRINTED BOOK

Who owns the most valuable book? The Mellc copy of the Gutenberg Bible was recently sold in New York to Mrs Edward'S. Harkness for £24,000. Tluis is a record. The only known copy of the fourth edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis was auctioned in London in 1919 for £14,000. The Gutenberg Bible, published in 1455. was the first book printed from movable type. The copy which Mrs Harkness bought and which she has presented to the Yale Library, is one of the 42 known, of which only 25 are complete. The Melk copy takes its name from an Austrian village. There, in a Benediction monastery, the book remained from its publication until its recent purchase from the monks by a British bookseller. The copy is well preserved, and every leaf is sound and genuine. ' The Bible is the Vulgate Text of St. Jerome, who lived from about 340 to 420, and whose version was the standard of Christendom for 1000 years. The Apocrypha are interspersed with the Canonical books, and the arrangement of the books is in many cases radically different from that of the English Bible. The book

is completely rubricated, and this work was done, collectors have declared, by a contemporary of Gutenberg, perhaps in his own workshop.