Noble Fragments: Gabriel Wells, the Gutenberg Bible and a Personal Family History
Michael Visontay
Is a rare book always greater than the sum of its parts? Is it a desecration to break up a copy of the world’s greatest book? Or is it democratising the book by making its historic pages more accessible to many more people than just one wealthy owner?
These are some of the questions that emerged as I wrote Noble Fragments, my story about a New York book dealer who broke up a copy of the Gutenberg Bible 100 years and sold it off in individual leaves, an act of literary vandalism that set off a chain of events that changed my family’s fortunes after surviving the Holocaust.
The invention of a movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1452-55 was a foundation of the Renaissance, becoming an indispensable tool for the expression of free thought. It opened the window to untold new audiences. It represents the democratisation of knowledge, a landmark in the advance of civilisation.
Up until five years ago, my eyes would have glazed over all of this information. My interest in the Gutenberg Bible began during the pandemic. My mother had just died, I was sitting in my parents’ house in suburban Sydney, surrounded by family papers, with lots of time on my hands and nothing to distract me. I started sorting through old documents and came across a couple of small metal strongboxes. One was red, the other blue; both were locked, the keys on a chain in a larger storage container. My father had died a decade earlier but it was clearly his handiwork.
The red strongbox contained an envelope with a bunch of thick papers. Inside was a legal document with a series of red stamps, typed on starchy paper, that seemed to link my grandfather to the estate of a man in New York named Gabriel Wells. I couldn’t make head or tail of what it meant. I had never heard of this person. Having worked as a journalist for 35 years, I thought I had pried every last secret from my father’s distant past.
I started googling and read a long obituary in the New York Times that said Wells was a prominent rare book dealer. It was the start of an obsessive quest which took me down rabbit holes. I couldn’t stop. I was hooked. A few months later – after endless combing of newspaper reports, shipping archives, academic monographs, midnight calls to American book dealers, collectors, and their children – I was a walking encyclopedia about a man who it seemed had done something, I didn’t yet quite know what, that shaped my family history.
This is a guest post by Michael Visontay, author of Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible which is published this month by Scribe.
