Margaret Leslie Davis: The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey

摘要

After years of research, the award-winning author Margaret Leslie Davis here presents the results of her work on some of the forty-eight surviving Gutenberg bibles, especially in American collections, especially Number 45. It seems difficult to categorize this book because it is not fully a historical study, not really a novel, not really a biography, and not fully an exact documentary. Instead, Davis has written an attractive, well-informed study of how one of these famous copies made its way first from Europe to North Americas and then also to Tokyo, Keio University. Her greatest contribution consists of her impressive archival investigations that have allowed her to weave a very lively, one might, however, sometimes also suspect fictional, account of how these Bible copies went from hand to hand and ultimately ended up in the collections where they are today, such as the one acquired by Estelle Betzold Doheny. The fictional elements come through when Davis describes in highly dramatic fashion how the package with the incunabulum arrived at the rich widow's home, was then opened, examined, cataloged, and archived.