A little birdie told me that if I was looking to buy a page from a Gutenberg Bible for $50,000, the 47th California International Antiquarian Book Fair is the place to be.
While I’d just as soon they kept copies of Gutenberg Bibles in one piece, and I have no idea if $50,000 is a good deal for a page of one, I notice there are a lot of other reasons to visit the Fair being held at the Pasadena Convention Center from Feburary 7-9.
This year’s Book Fair will include a special celebration of William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. A display from the Huntington Library and Memorial Gardens will focus on its Shakespeare scholarship since 1920. Fine art and private press books from the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College will show how Shakespeare has inspired the art of the book. Prompt books with actors’ handwritten notes and costume and set designs from the Honnold/Mudd Library at the Claremont College Library will offer insights into stage productions.
Rare books on food and cookery in Elizabeth times from The University of California San Diego library and a related special panel “What Shakespeare Ate: Dining in the Elizabethan Age” on Saturday at 1 p.m.will further immerse Book Fair visitors into the world of the Bard. Panelists include Los Angeles Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold; noted food historian Charles Perry; cookbook author and founder of the Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne Anne Willan; and bookseller Ben Kinmont who specializes in antiquarian books on gastronomy. Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison will moderate.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]
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They do not rip pages out of a bible they are most likely the one page that survived from that bible from the ravages of time.
When visiting that German town on a school trip, the class visited the Gutenburg Museam /house. You could buy a tiny printing of the Lord’s Prayer, or a selected page of the Bible. This was 1960.
John King Tarpinian writes:
They do not rip pages out of a bible they are most likely the one page that survived from that bible from the ravages of time.
It’s not a page of the biblical text. It’s merely an ad for the Science Fiction Book Club (offering, I think, both volumes of The Treasury of Science Fiction for ten cents) that was bound into the Gutenberg Bible, then torn out.
Pre steam punk, at any rate.
Better a blown-in Science Fiction Book Club card than a bound-in glossy cigarette ad.