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33 reviews for:
The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey
Margaret Leslie Davis
3.68 AVERAGE
33 reviews for:
The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey
Margaret Leslie Davis
3.68 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
It’s not a book that’ll stick with me forever but is still great. I loved learning about once copy of a Gutenberg bible through several centuries. The history was fascinating. The author wrote well and made it fun to read. Excellent book
Fascinating story of how Gutenberg Bibles came to become collectible, the book focuses on one particular copy and its many owners while branching out into related topics.
Gutenberg bible #45, which only contains the first volume, was the only Gutenberg bible to be owned by a female collector. This book traces the history of how #45 cam to be in the hands of Estelle Doheny, and what happened after, when the book played a pivotal role in scientific advances.
Pros:
•the subject matter was really interesting; it was cool to learn more about what book collecting was like and the different advances made
•The photos added to the text as well, especially those of the bible
Cons:
•parts of it felt a little dry to me, particularly the parts that didn’t relate to Estelle’s story. I almost feel like I would have benefitted more from reading a long article instead of a short book
•So I appreciated the captions on the photos that gave some summaries of what had been going on, but they were often slightly ahead of what was being said in the text and slightly spoiled it
•This is probably on me but I don’t quite follow why the title was the Lost Gutenberg- why was it lost?
Recommendation: I recommend if you’re into books and history and interested in the subject matter! The best part of the book was learning the information, so I recommend based on whether you are interested in learning that. It’s not too long but there are some parts that are a little dry.
Pros:
•the subject matter was really interesting; it was cool to learn more about what book collecting was like and the different advances made
•The photos added to the text as well, especially those of the bible
Cons:
•parts of it felt a little dry to me, particularly the parts that didn’t relate to Estelle’s story. I almost feel like I would have benefitted more from reading a long article instead of a short book
•So I appreciated the captions on the photos that gave some summaries of what had been going on, but they were often slightly ahead of what was being said in the text and slightly spoiled it
•This is probably on me but I don’t quite follow why the title was the Lost Gutenberg- why was it lost?
Recommendation: I recommend if you’re into books and history and interested in the subject matter! The best part of the book was learning the information, so I recommend based on whether you are interested in learning that. It’s not too long but there are some parts that are a little dry.
informative
medium-paced
Interesting history of the provenance of one copy of a Gutenberg bible. This was a good read to follow The Library of Shipwrecked Books, which I finished the other day. Overall, book collectors can be more than just hoarders... can be... but frequently aren't. In the end, to no one's surprise, the Catholic church is populated with greedy idiots.
I don’t know what I was expecting from this book but it was way too heavy on exploring the lives and fortunes of wealthy people and not nearly enough about the book itself. I couldn’t wade through it.
Maybe I should have read more descriptions before I picked this book up, because I found it to be really disappointing.
First of all, I have no idea why the title is "The Lost Gutenberg" because the book wasn't lost. In fact, this is a very detailed description of where this one particular copy of the Gutenberg Bible has been for the past 200 years.
The book basically comprises mini biographies of all of the book's owners over the years: who they were, how they gained their wealth, how they got into book collecting, how they acquired the Gutenberg, and what they did with it.
The book is a history, and for all but the final pages talks about things that happened in the past, and yet the ENTIRE BOOK IS IN THE PRESENT TENSE which I found incredibly distracting and annoying, especially when the author needed to talk about things that happened later than the thing she's currently discussing, so she had to use the future tense to talk about history. There is absolutely no reason for anything in this book to be in the present tense.
Ultimately, there was no larger narrative here: in the final pages when she talks about how the book has been used for research and what we have learned about Gutenberg and his process from it, she comes close to making a larger point about the importance of this book, but that point never justifies the entire narrative she has told. So in the end, this book is just a list of things that happened.... I hoped for there to be deeper thesis about the good and/or harm done by book collectors, or how the perceived value of books shifts based on other things in society, or the role of women in book curation, but Davis doesn't take the effort to develop these ideas into a thesis.
“ ‘the collecting of books is . . . the summum bonum [highest good] of the acquisitive desire, for the reason that books brought together by plan and purposely kept together are a social force to be reckoned with, as long as people have clear eyes and free minds.’” - Lawrence Clark Powell
A fascinating unfolding of the frenzy of wealthy collectors and dealers of rare books after the single most valuable book in the world.
A fascinating unfolding of the frenzy of wealthy collectors and dealers of rare books after the single most valuable book in the world.
Interesting story of the Bible numbered as 45, one of only 49 known surviving copies printed by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450's. Davis discusses the importance of the book as the first printed in the West using moveable type, and traces the modern history of its progression through several owners in the 1800's through the acquisition by Estelle Doheny, widow to a large oil fortune in Southern California. The notion of its being "lost" is never explained, as the chain of custody is well-documented from the time it surfaces in the mid-1800's to its disappearance from public view to a vault at Keio University in Japan, the current owners. The book gives a fascinating look inside the world of rare book collecting through the last couple of hundred years. It's unlikely that another Gutenberg Bible will ever reach an auction house again.