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2009.2086.67

Title

How the Library of Congress Acquired its Gutenberg Bible

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Presentation

Date

April 9, 1988

Creator

Augustine E. Winnemore

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How the Library of Congress Acquired its Gutenberg Bible or The Gutenberg Bible and the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church
The Merry Macs
Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church
April 9, 1988
Augustine E. Winnemore

based on the address of Frederick W. Ashley "The Story of the Vollbehr Collection of Incunabula" at the Eleventh Annual Conference on Printing Education, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., June 27, 1932

I am a printer, as you know, and have taught printing in the on schools for many years. Since boyhood I have been interested in printing, its history, type, presses, and the art of that great trade. Type faces have their own charms -- italic (some say based on the handwriting of Petrarch), Bodoni, Baskerville, Garamond, gothic, and the like. And monuments exist in beautifully printed books in these and many other type faces. Probably the greatest monument of all is the 42-line Bible printed by Johann Gutenberg in about 1455 in beautiful gothic type with splendid and colorful capital illuminations. A facsimile page is on display here.

Attempts at printing whole pages had been made long before Gutenberg in what we know as the "block print" -- a whole page carved out in hard wood and pressed on a sheet of parchment, vellum, or paper. Gutenberg's invention lay in casting many, many pieces of individual characters of the alphabet, which could be assembled, printed from, then distributed and reused in various combinations to make different words for many different pages, and for many books. After ten or eleven years of experiment Gutenberg learned how to make these movable metal letters and how to keep them together for printing. After he struck the right track it took him five years to make two or three hundred copies of his Bible.

The art spread moving from Meinz to other German cities, and quickly down into Italy, incidentally throwing out of business many a calligrapher. But the advance was both productive and revolutionary. Modern presses now turn out about 250,000 books each year world wide. Few books, however, are better proportioned, and more lovely to look at than that first 42-line Bible. We are fortunate in this city to have, in the Library of Congress, one of the very excellent copies of that unsurpassed triumph of printing. Questions: How did it get there, and what possible connection has it with our church?

The story is serious history having to do with accidents, war, economic crises, politics, and vision. Parts of it have the qualities of a cloak and dagger romance. We come to it by way of Frederick W. Ashley, who in the 1920s was a ruling elder of this church, and Fred J. Hartman, also a member of this church. Fred Hartman was Educational Director of what is now The Printing Industry of America, Inc. One of his projects was sponsoring the annual conference on Printing Education for the teachers of printing. In 1932 the Library of Congress had only recently acquired its Gutenberg Bible, so Dr. Hartman invited Dr. Ashley to address the Conference on its acquisition.

Dr. Ashley, whom a number of us here remember, was the Chief Assistant Librarian, Library of Congress, and Superintendent of the Reading Room -- a modest, quiet, scholarly man and administrator. He knew books and he knew book collectors. The late 19th and 20th centuries marked a shrewd competition between book collectors, especially in this country. One thinks of Henry Huntington (who founded the Library named for him in Pasadena, California), of Henry Clay Folger, who did the same for our Folger Shakespeare Library, and J. P. Morgan, to name a few. Some collectors specialized, wanting to gather all printed books about a certain writer, or all looks issued from a particular press, or all books printed a specified type face. But many of them for the past hundred years have sought to embellish their collections by specimens of incunabula.

Incunabula (Latin cradle) refers to books printed in the cradle years of printing, that is, everything done from its invention in about 1450 to 1500 -- a tidy fifty years. Henry Huntington, over the years collected (among other vast holdings) about 5,000 incunabula, and spent more than $24,000,000 on his holdings. In Germany,just before the first World War a wealthy German, Dr. Otto Vollbehr, made a great deal of money in dye works and tuffs, but a train accident put him in the hospital for a long time and shattered his nervous system. Doctors advised him to adopt a hobby as therapy. He took up collecting incunabula, and amassed over 3,000 items, including the Cella Alba St. Paul Abbey Gutenberg Bible. Few if any of the previous collectors of incunabula had given a thought to the contents of the books. Now, Dr. Vollbehr's aim was to get together a collection that would show what the people of the Fifteenth Century were thinking about. His library is representative to an amazing degree of every sort of publication that came from Fifteenth Century presses. The World War played havoc, as Dr. Ashley tells us, with many German fortunes and reduced Dr. Vollbehr's to such an extent that he had to dispose of his great collection. We pick up that story in a moment.

The Library of Congress already had a sizeable collection of Incunabula, gained from John Boyd Thatcher of Albany, who had set out to get one book from every printing press in Europe before the year 1501. He had amassed specimens from five hundred and twenty presses. Frederick W. Ashley engineered the acquisition of the Thatcher collection for the Library of Congress, laying a base here for such books. Dr. Vollbehr, needing funds, wished Not to sell items from his years of collecting piecemeal, for that would erase his efforts at collecting his 3,000 items. He brought it to the United States in 1926, exhibiting part of it in Chicago, New York and Washington. He offered the collection to the Library of Congress at a value of three million dollars, -- a cost too rich for any single donor to assume. But the Hon. Ross A. Collins, a graduate of the University of Mississippi, and formerly Attorney General for his state of Mississippi, authored an Act of Congress to purchase the collection for a million and a half dollars. Without objection the bill passed on July 3, 1930. The Library of Congress up to that time possessed only a single page of a Gutenberg Bible. Congressman Collins said of the collection a number of months after its purchase: "The gratitude of the entire people of the land is due the Seventy-first Congress for its wisdom in the purchase of the Vollbehr Collection of Fifteenth Century books including the famous St. Paul copy of the Gutenberg Bible. This purchase involved the appropriation of one and a half million dollars . . . and be it said, to the credit of our national cultural foresight, not a voice was raised against this Act….The Library is often recipient of gifts from philanthropic individuals, but it seems especially fitting that the whole people share in the purchase of such a collection. . . . The American people may well congratulate themselves on this achievement."

Within ten days after the Act was passed the three thousand incunabula, each at least four hundred and thirty years old, came down from New York in armored motor trucks, traveling by night along the less frequented roads. There was no accident along the way. The Bible itself came later, and we'll get to that in a moment. First, what is the value of this mighty collection for research purposes? Its study for literature is an almost virgin field. The fifteenth century was much concerned with religion, so there is a notable representation of religious books including the first (Gutenberg) Bible and thirty others until the last one printed December 31, 1500. Three hundred of the other titles are in law; one hundred and fifty in medicine, and almost all of the historical and literary classics are there. The invention of printing came just at the time when the Renaissance had aroused keen interest in Greek and Latin classics. There are, as a sample, 18 different editions of Aristotle, 37 of Cicero, 13 of Ovid, 15 of Pliny, 5 of Caesar -- the list seems endless and shows pretty well what those who could read in the middle ages were brought up on. There are 13 editions of Boccaccio, 7 of Dante, and 11 of Petrarch. The rest are in history, music, philosophy, geography, logic, astronomy, agriculture, witchcraft, magic, cookery, mathematics, architecture, ethics, biography -- and the coverage of the social fields continues on and on. This wealth of knowledge came to Washington, D.C., in mid July, 1930, but the star of the collection, the Bible itself, remained to be delivered. It came in September, and the story of its progress from the Abbey of St. Paul is fascinating. The Abbey lay in a mountain valley in Austria. Its history goes back at least eight hundred years, and the monks who owned it, though moving four times, carried their bible with them.

A few details are extant concerning the Bible's glacial-like movements from Mainz in 1456 to this Abbey of St. Paul in 1900. The Benedictine monks, who were the most effective order in preserving learning through the dark ages, had long occupied a monastery Cella Alba (the White Abbey) at St. Blasius in the Black Forest in Baden, Southwest Germany, 15 miles from the Swiss border. The Librarian of Celia Alba described in a dissertation the distinguishing characteristics of a three-volume vellum Bible in his custody. The dissertation was quoted in a book published in 1783. The Librarian noted that the volumes had come to St. Blasius from Paris about 1457. So at the time he was writing the books had slumbered there for about 350 years. When the French Revolution boiled over in 1794 French soldiers were plundering for objects of art to decorate Paris. So the monks of Cella Alba slipped across the Rhine to Switzerland. When the French followed, they moved again and again, taking their Bible with them. The St. Blasius Monastery went out of existence in 1803, but its monks appeared in a Hospice in the Alps in upper Austria. Their Bible was with them.

In 1829 the Emperor of Austria gave a ruined monastery to the Cella monks, who repaired and refurbished it to become the Abbey St. Paul. The Bible, to all intents and purposes had been lost, but in 1900 a famous German bibliographer, P. Schwank, discovered and described it there. Its travels and actual preservation seem now to have been a miracle.

In, 1926 the Abbot of St. Paul announced that the Bible had been contracted for by Dr. Vollbehr for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The government of Austria intervened telling the monastery the price should be raised to $250,000. Vollbehr agreed and put down a considerable deposit. When he came to settle for it in 1930 heavy interest charges, export fees of $25,000, and other items brought the price to $375,000 -- the highest price paid to that date for a single work.

As soon as Dr. Vollbehr had seen the bulk of his collection safely in the Library of Congress he set out for Austria to get the book called "The Greatest Book in the World." It happened that Dr. Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress, was in Europe at the time, and went to the Abbey of St. Paul to meet Dr. Volbehr and see the Bible in the hands of the venerable Benedictine Order that had guarded it for almost 500 years. The transfer of the work occasioned a ceremony at which a member of the Monastery staff in said in part, addressing Vollbehr: "Dear Doctor, we are about to put into your hands the most precious jewel of our archives. The alienation of this famous work was a necessity brought about by a financial crisis in consequence of the Great War. We hold responsible for this grievous loss those who conjured up the World War. As our monastery was going to convert the book into victuals, you became the savior of our lives by its purchase. Special thanks are due to you for preserving the book from becoming an object of commerce since you are planning to put it in the Library of Congress, where it will be a possession forever, far more accessible to the world than ever before. We congratulate you, Dear Doctor, and the United States of America, upon the acquisition of this 'book of books' with the formula of benediction-'God have you in his keeping.'"

On the sixteenth of August the book was delivered to the United States at the American Legation in Vienna. Our Minister there (in the Hoover administration) Mr. Stockton sealed the books (for the Bible is in three volumes) in a water tight metal case, inclosed them in a cubical trunk, sealed the trunk with seals of the Leglation, and sent it for Dr. Putnam, by special Legation courier to Paris, where Ambassador Edge received it, and sent it by another courier to the deck of the Leviathan in Cherbourg harbor, France, and delivered it to Dr. Putnam, who brought it safely across. Word was out, you see, that a very valuable piece of cargo was in transit, and highjackers were not unknown in those days.

But the Vollbehr circumstances financially were not all settled. A few days before the Leviathan arrived over here, it was learned that a New York agent and his Washington attorney expected to meet the ship at the dock in New York, prepared to seize the book on the ground of an unfounded claim against Dr. Vollbehr for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Their story was that the agent had hired an important man to lobby through Congress the bill to buy the collection. But, before dawn on the morning of the Leviathan's arrival, two men from the Library of Congress, armed with authority from the Treasury in Washington, went down the bay in a revenue cutter to meet the incoming ship. The two men climbed up the lofty ladder to the ship's deck and quietly took charge of a small cubical trunk in Dr. Putnam's stateroom. When the Librarian left the ship at the dock, he was met on the pier by the claimant and his attorney, but the Greatest Book in the World was at that moment in a taxicab in Jersey City speeding to the train. It arrived here a day ahead of the Librarian, and was locked up in one of Uncle Sam's safes. In Washington the claimant got an injunction restraining Dr. Vollbehr from receiving the last seventy-five thousand dollars of the purchase price of the collection, until the case could be tried. Upon final hearing in February, 1931, the court decided that the claimant had no just claim to a penny, and that he should pay Dr. Vollbehr, for the little gunning expedition, some thousands of dollars to meet the interest on the sum tied up for six months by the injunction and for Dr. Vollbehr's expenses in fighting off the "locust swarm." True to nature, though beaten, they carried case up to the Court of Appeals, which, about six weeks later, affirmed the judgment given in the lower court.

Now you may ask, "Well, Gus, how do you know all these things about that collection, and the process of obtaining it?" My information comes from two sources. First, as a member of the Arts Education Association, I was present in the Coolidge Auditorium on the evening of June 27, 1932, when Dr. Frederick W. Ashley whom I knew well at our church, gave his address at the Eleventh Annual Conference on Printing Education, entitled "The Vollbehr Incunabula and the Book of Books." A full story, rich in scholarship, and pleasant in excitement, it was. I remember it clearly. And secondly, the Honorable George H. Carter, the Public Printer, and as such the head of the Government Printing Office, was so impressed by Dr. Ashley's address that he had it published at the Government Printing Office, in November 1932, in a limited de lux edition in the format of the Gutenberg 42-line Bible. I have reread the talk as printed, and take much of my material this evening from the text. It received, with Dr. Ashley's permission, several other printings by private presses as keepsakes for meetings of printers, Graphic Arts Conferences, and book lovers. I commend it to you (if you can lay hands on a copy), and as a keepsake for this meeting I leave with you a xerox copy of the pace of Dr. Ashley's talk, which is from Dr. Ashley's own and has been supplied me by Dr. John Broderick, Assistant Librarian for Research Services at the Library of Congress.

The exhibits on the columns this evening include a facsimile of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, showing the beautiful ornamentation done by monks on previously printed pages. This facsimile was printed in 1955 as a keepsake observing the 500th Anniversary of Gutenberg's invention of movable type about 1455.

On the next column is a reproduction of two pages of Dr. Ashley's talk which was printed in the format of Gutenberg's 42-line Bible at the Government Printing Office.

Next shows the progress through Congress of the Bill introduced by Representative Ross A. Collins for the purchase of the Vollbehr Incunabula and the Book of Books, as Gutenberg's Bible is called.

The subsequent posters are from a series of advertisements by a paper manufacturing company inspired by the Old Masters of Printing: The series, with beautiful illustrations and comments on them, appeared in Fortune magazine during 1933 and 1934. The rations and comments included early printers Johann Fust, William Caxton, Aldus Manutius, Koberger, Christopher Plantin, Stephen Day and John Baskerville.

Dr. Ashley included in his talk a story of the early days of printing taken from Charles Reade's great book the "Cloister and the Hearth," with a vivid panorama of the Fifteenth Century. I would like to read you that bit.

When Gerard, the hero of the "Cloister and the Hearth," was in Rome working as a copyist, hurrying past a shop window one day his eye was arrested by an open copy of Lactantius. "That is fairly writ, anyway," he thought, and then he saw that it was not written at all, but printed. "I am sped," he groaned. "The press is in Rome:" He went in and asked how long the printing press had been in Rome. "Oh, the Lactantius; that was printed on the top of the Apennines."

And on the Title-page he read, "Printed at Subiaco, 1465, by Sweynheym and Pannartz, disciples of Johann Fust;" Subiaco, a little village picturesquely situated in the hills about fifty miles from Rome where Turrecremata encouraged Sweynheym and Pannartz to set up in 1464 the first printing press that ever operated in Italy. "Will ye Buy?" said the bookseller. "I would fain to have it but my heart won't let me. I am a calligrapher and these disciples of Fust run after me round the world, a-taking the bread out of my mouth."

And you will recall how afterwards, when he had left Rome as Friar Clement on his pilgrimage to Basel, he found two tired wayfarers lying in the shade by the roadside. That must have been in 1467, for these printers printed their last book in Subiaco in June 1467, and their first in Rome in November 1467. Near by was a little cart and in it a printing press, rude and clumsy as a wine press.

And so Clement the calligrapher stood for the first time face to face with his old enemy, the printing press, that was to destroy the trade of all the penmen. And as he eyed it and the honest blue-eyed faces of the weary craftsmen, he looked back as on a dream at the bitterness he had once felt toward this machine. He looked kindly down on them and said softly "Sweynheym:" The men started to their feet. "Pannartz:" They scuttled into the wood, thinking it was by magic that a stranger could call their names. "My children," said Clement, "Ilsaw a Lactantius in Rome printed by Sweynheym and Pwlartz. By your blue eyes and flaxen hair I wist ye were Germans. The printing press spoke for itself. Who then should ye be but Pannartz and Sweynheym?"

The two printers, like so many journeymen since, were penniless. Clement gave them some money, and to show their gratitude they took the press out of the cart, bustled about now on the white hot road, now in the cool shade, and presently printed a quarto sheet of eight pages, which was already set up. They had not type enough to print two sheets at a time. When the printed sheet was pulled all in a moment, Clement cried "What, are all these words really fast on paper? Will they not go as swiftly as they came? And you took me for a magician: My sons, you carry here the very wings of knowledge. Oh, never abuse your great craft. Print no ill books. They would fly abroad countless as locusts and lay waste men's souls."

In that little picture, only one of a thousand in the greatest historical novel, how much we see! The decay of one art, the rise and spread of another, the introduction of printing from Germany into Italy, the clumsy tools producing miracles in the hands of true craftsmen, the poverty in which those early workmen struggled.

And now, in the words of the monastery Doctor to Dr. Vollbehr at the conclusion of his ceremonial talk transferring the Gutenberg Bible, "God have you in his keeping."