Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

Tall folio. With an original leaf from the Fust & Schoeffer Bible laid into a cloth portfolio; text volume bound in quarter morocco; together housed in publisher's folding cloth case.

LIMITED EDITION, one of 166 copies, CONTAINING AN ORIGINAL LEAF FROM THE FIRST DATED BIBLE: a single leaf, published in Mainz by Johann Fust & Peter Schoeffer on 14 August 1462, folio (406 x 305 mm), 48-lines, double-column, rubricated 2-line initials with pen flourishes, running titles in red and blue, vertical and horizontal bounding lines ruled full across, reading on the recto from Biblia Sacra Vulgata, 21:13, "Amorrhaei. Siquidem Arnon terminus est Moab, dividens Moabitas et Amorrhaeos..." to Biblia Sacra Vulgata 23:18 on the verso, "At ille, assumpta parabola sua, ait: Sta, Balac, et ausculta; audio."

The 1462 Fust & Schoeffer Bible was the fourth printed edition of the Bible and the first to explicitly state the names of its printers and date of publication. Johann Fust, who had previously financed Gutenberg's famous 1455 Bible, partnered with Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg's former apprentice, to produce this two-volume Latin Bible. It featured a new, more legible Gotico-Antiqua typeface developed by Schoeffer, which was considered a masterpiece and a precursor to the modern Antiqua type.

In the opening essay, Koenig examines the present pen flourishes and concludes that "although the book was printed in Germany, these leaves were decorated in England, making this incomplete copy, dismembered long ago, one of the earliest printed books to have been imported into England. He also suggested, but left the matter open, that the decoration was done in Surrey, at the Charterhouse of Jesus of Bethlehem, at Sheen" Joel Silver, "Catalog of the Exhibition," in: Disbound and Dispersed, item 42; Chalmers Disbound and Dispersed Checklist 202.