In the book world, the rarest of the rare
Would you pay $25 million for a Bible?
By Philipp Harper
Every passion has its Holy Grail, and rare-book collecting is no exception.
Ask a group of bibliophiles to identify the rarest of all rare books, and a majority probably would cite the Gutenberg Bible of 1456, the first book ever printed.
Assuming a collector could find a complete first-edition Bible, which had a run of several hundred copies, he could expect to pay anywhere from $25 million to $35 million, says rare-book expert Kenneth Gloss, proprietor of Brattle Book Shop in Boston.
Gloss, a well-known appraiser who has appeared on PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow,” bases his estimate on the fact that a single volume of the two-volume Gutenberg set sold for $5.5 million about 25 years ago. Today, single pages from first-edition Bibles fetch $25,000 each.
Anyone who can afford to invest in the top end of the antiquarian market generally will do very well. Consider, for example:
- A first edition of the collected works of Shakespeare published in 1623 sold not long ago for more than $6 million, a record price for the Bard’s works.
- The collection of Leonardo Da Vinci manuscripts that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates paid $30 million for more than 25 years ago now may be worth as much as $100 million, Gloss estimates.
Old books from the New World
While anything printed in the United States is of comparatively recent vintage, that hasn’t prevented demand for rare American works from going through the roof, too.
The most precious of the lot is a first-edition copy of the Declaration of Independence, several hundred of which were printed in Philadelphia for distribution throughout the Colonies after the original handwritten document was signed by the Founding Fathers. Though the copies did not bear signatures, the last one to come to market sold to television mogul Norman Lear for a cool $8 million.
Other items have seen their value build slowly through the years. Edgar Allen Poe’s first published poem, “Tamerlane,” is a case in point. Originally printed in 1827, the poem’s byline read “By a Bostonian.” It didn’t fare well with the reading public in large part, Gloss says, because “actually it was pretty horrible.”
The fact that its affiliation with Poe is obscured by its vague byline has given the poem a certain cachet as a hidden treasure to be bought cheap from unwitting sellers and then sold high to knowledgeable buyers. The latest instance of this occurred about a decade ago when a sharp-eyed collector bought the volume off a dealer’s $15 table and then turned around and sold it for $198,000.