It’s the first book ever printed, and still the most commonly printed book in the world: today we’re talking about the Bible. Because there are so many copies out there, older Bibles command a wide range of prices—from nicely bound Victorian volumes with mostly sentimental value to the famous Gutenberg Bible, a single page of which can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are also pre-printing press Bibles, worth millions but historically priceless, as well as copies that collectors want because they belonged to famous figures like JFK or Elvis. We’ll even talk about where old Bibles go to retire (because nobody wants to just throw them out).
Brattlecast #81 - One Book Collections
Perhaps amassing 2000 copies of Walden isn’t exactly what Thoreau meant when he exhorted us to ‘Simplify, simplify,’ however, some collectors do simplify their libraries by collecting different editions of a single book. Books like the Bible, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the works of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Dante Alighieri have been published so often, with such a variety of bindings, languages, and illustrations, that a collection of even one of these books would be impossible to ever complete. We’ll take a look at a few of these monomaniacal collections on this week’s brattlecast.