„A Gutenberg Bible sold at auction yesterday for $2 million, the highest price ever known to have been paid for a book. Martin Breslauer, the Berlin-born, Fifth Avenue rare-book dealer, made the purchase at Christie, Manson & Woods, Park Avenue at 59th Street. Although Mr. Breslauer would not disclose whom he was bidding for, he was seated near Gerhard Weng, Secretary for the Ministry of Culture of Baden-Wiirttemberg in Stuttgart, West Germany, and Hans-Peter Geh, director of the state library. Mr. Geh acknowledged to The New York Times that the purchase was made for the library. He said that his library had the largest and, as of yesterday, the most important collection of Bibles in the world. The standing-room crowd of more than 500 people was surprised at the swiftness of the sale of the Gutenberg; it began an hour late, at 1 P.M., and took less than two minutes to complete. The most disappointed person in the room appeared to be John Jenkins, rare-book dealer from Austin, Tex., who stayed in as underbidder to $1.6 million. He represented Allen & Company, the New York investment bankers and the controlling interest in Columbia Pictures. Mr. Jenkins said later that it was his understanding that Charles and Herbert Alien Jr., chairman adn president, respectively, of the concern, had hoped to keep the Gutenberg in the United States and to place it on public view. David Bathurst, Christie’s president in New York, and Stephen Massey, its specialist in rare books, were jubilant over the price. They said, too, that they had not been worried by the discovery of a major’ error in this copy, one of 185 to 200 printed in Mainz 500 years ago by Johannes Gutenberg, the German who invented movable type. Of the 48 Gutenbergs known to be extant, one owned by the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Inc., is still up for sale, for about the same price. A third Gutenberg was sold last month for $1.8 million by Hans P. Kraus, the New York book dealer. The price was, until yesterday, the highest known to have ever been paid for a book. The mistake in the copy sold yesterday was discovered in a page-by-page inspection of the two-volume book by two potential bidders, John Kebabian and Roland Folter, bibliographers at H.P. Kraus. They found that there were two impositions of one page and that one page was missing“ (Rita Reif, New York Times, April 8, 1978). – Schutzumschlag mit kleinen Randläsuren, gutes Exemplar.

Schlagwörter: Auktionskataloge, Gutenberg-Bibel

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