From the Yale Library Gazette Archive: Andrew Keogh, The Gutenberg Bible as a Typographical Monument, The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 1, No. 1 (JUNE 1926), published by: the Yale University Library
“On the right bank of the Danube, about fifty miles west of Vienna, lies the town of Melk, with a population numbering something less than three thousand. The town is probably of Celtic origin, and was well known to the Romans. An isolated granite rock towers above it for two hundred feet, & on this rock there has stood since 1089 a Benedictine Abbey. The Abbey has always had an important place in both the secular and the ecclesiastical history of Lower Austria, and it appears in the Nibelungenlied and in other epics and chronicles. From 1702 to 1736 a new building in the baroque style was erected by the fifty-second abbot, and its large scale and commanding position make it one of the finest edifices on the upper river. A handsome hall holds the abbatical library of 70,000 volumes, a library rich in manuscripts and in early printed books. Of incunabula alone (i.e. of books printed before 1501) it has no fewer than 868 (four times as many as Yale), and the catalogue of these rarities published in 1901 includes two German Bibles & twenty Latin Bibles printed in the Fifteenth Century. One of these Latin Bibles the librarian describes in brief fashion, but he adds to his description the words “A true jewel.” To him who understands, his restraint was eloquent, for he had before him one of the finest copies of the first Bible ever printed, and in our western civilization the first book ever printed. It is the coming of this Bible to Yale that we are celebrating to-day.
The Great War made changes at Melk as in other parts of Austria, and the monks sold the Bible last year to Mr. Edward Goldston, a London bookseller. Mr. Goldston consigned it to the Anderson Galleries in New York, where it was sold on February 15th last to Dr. Abraham S. Wolf Rosenbach, the well-known New York & Philadelphia dealer, for $106,000. From Dr. Rosenbach it was bought by Mrs. Edward S. Harkness of New York, who gave it to Yale in memory of Mrs. Stephen V. Harkness, the donor of our Memorial Quadrangle. The Bible is a fitting memorial of a princely giver.”
READ the whole article: The Gutenberg Bible as a Typographical Monument
View the Beinecke Library’s Gutenberg Bible on the digital library.
A contemporary view of the Melk Abbey (thanks to Elaine Vivero)
