Today I took my book his­tory class to the library. Their task? To col­lect as many 19th-century books as they could (since the cat­a­logue indi­cated that we have a num­ber in the stacks).

They found a lot of intrigu­ing books. One biog­ra­phy of Alexan­der Hamil­ton had sev­eral news­pa­per clip­pings (ca. 1899) pasted to the fly­leaves. In a Ger­man biog­ra­phy of Bis­marck, we found a smaller-format page torn out of another Ger­man book, appar­ently used as a book­mark. My Ger­man may be rusty, but it’s still good enough to tell that the torn-out page was from a Ger­man account of the Mexican-American War. We also found an 1867 edi­tion of Pollard’s The Lost Cause, the first South­ern account of the Civil War. The ear­li­est book my stu­dents found in the stacks, pub­lished in 1838, is Shake­speare and his Friends, Or, “The golden age” of merry Eng­land, a novel which I obvi­ously must read immediately.

I’m friends with our sub­ject librar­ian, and I had talked to her about the visit. She had men­tioned that there were some shelves of dis­cards that the library still hadn’t got­ten rid of (note, 10/19: see clar­i­fi­ca­tion below). So after my stu­dents and I ooh-ed and aah-ed over the dis­cov­er­ies from the stacks, we headed up to her office. She took us back to the dis­card shelves and pulled a few books for us to look at. “Oh, and there’s this one,” she said, hand­ing me a thick vellum-bound book. She had pulled it because she thought we’d like to see its bind­ing. My jaw dropped when she handed it to me and I looked at the title page: it was a Latin bible pub­lished in 1591. On the dis­card shelf.

At first, I thought it had to be a fac­sim­ile. (We had already seen one fac­sim­ile from the stacks.) But the bind­ing cer­tainly looked con­tem­po­rary. And that was def­i­nitely 16th-century paper…

(I apol­o­gize for the iPhone pho­tos that fol­low. I was too excited to wait for proper equipment!)

I may have hugged it. Gently.

Since the book had already been removed from the col­lec­tion, I was allowed to take it back to my office, where I pored over it all afternoon.

The USTC lists two Latin bibles pub­lished in Basel with this title: one in 1578 (also described as the “secun­dum edi­tionem”) and a 1590 edi­tion bear­ing the same title, but pre­sum­ably includ­ing only the New Tes­ta­ment, since it has “tomus secun­dus” appended to the title. The 1591 edi­tion (impres­sion?) sit­ting in front of me does not appear in USTC.

The 1578 and 1590 edi­tions were both printed by Thomas Guarin. Although the title page of this book bears no explicit imprint, below you can see a close-up of the printer’s device, which reads “Palma Guar” and which I there­fore assume is Guarin’s. (If any­one can point me to a com­pi­la­tion of print­ers’ devices that would include Swiss print­ers, I would greatly appre­ci­ate it!)

It’s an amaz­ing book. The two maps are still intact, as you can see below:

The bind­ing is remark­ably strong. As you can just barely see in the back­ground of the above image, I fash­ioned a makeshift cra­dle out of two (bright blue) binders, but it wouldn’t have been absolutely nec­es­sary. Snakes would have made the process quite a bit eas­ier, though!

This seems like a rel­a­tively lav­ish bible to me in that there are many detailed engrav­ings. Here are a cou­ple of my favorites so far:

The fact that this bible was printed in Basel implies protes­tant lean­ings, but to some­one like me who is pri­mar­ily famil­iar with the Geneva Bible, the fre­quency of the images leaps out as unusual. Per­haps this is merely a result of my lack of famil­iar­ity with con­ti­nen­tal protes­tant bibles, though.

At first, it also seemed strange to me that a bible would be printed in Latin in protes­tant Basel, since protes­tants are typ­i­cally so strongly asso­ci­ated with bibles in the ver­nac­u­lar. How­ever, Switzerland’s low lit­er­acy rate meant that pub­lish­ers relied on book fairs for most of their sales, as Lukas Erne points out:

[T]he pro­por­tion of peo­ple read­ing reg­u­larly was prob­a­bly no higher than 2 per cent before and 4 per cent after the Ref­or­ma­tion. Pub­lish­ers there­fore did not pri­mar­ily aim at local sales, and the book fairs in Frank­furt, Leipzig, Paris, and Lyons remained of great impor­tance for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of books pro­duced in Switzer­land. This may also explain why through­out the 16^th and 17^th cen­turies books printed in Switzerland—contrary to other Euro­pean countries—mostly con­tin­ued to appear in Latin rather than in the ver­nac­u­lar. (source)

I’ve dis­cov­ered a fair amount of infor­ma­tion about this book in the past few hours, and there’s still so much to learn. Who was Thomas Guarin? My ini­tial searches have turned up no schol­ar­ship about him, though from USTC I can tell that he was a pro­lific pub­lisher: search­ing for his name returns 100 results from 1559–1590. (The last result, in fact, is the 1590 edi­tion of this bible. Does this 1591 edition/impression extend our evi­dence of his career past a pre­vi­ously known end date?) In addi­tion to bibles, he pub­lished Plot­i­nus, Paracel­sus, Cicero, Plutarch, Isocrates, Aris­to­tle, and Pietro Bembo. The vast major­ity of his works are in Latin, but he also pub­lished in Greek, Hebrew, Ger­man and even twice in Eng­lish (two books by Thomas Cartwright respond­ing to Whit­gift). But who was Guarin? Do any records sur­vive about him?

These are ques­tions I hope to pur­sue further—but I hope that any­one who reads this and has sug­ges­tions for me will leave a com­ment to let me know!

For every­one else, which bib­li­cal sto­ries should I look up in this bible to see if there are engrav­ings as amaz­ing as Noah’s uni­corns and Jael?

Edit for clar­i­fi­ca­tion, 10/19: There are a cou­ple of points on which my orig­i­nal post was unclear, so I’d like to address those.

1. I didn’t mean to imply that I saved the book from being imme­di­ately tossed in a Good­will box or some­thing. It was on the dis­card shelf because it had been pulled from the col­lec­tion (where pre­vi­ously it had been hang­ing out in the stacks—it’s got a bar code and every­thing), but the library hadn’t yet decided what to do with it. They prob­a­bly would have sold it even­tu­ally if I hadn’t stum­bled across it. In any case, it was still there because of the librar­i­ans. They saved it; I rec­og­nized that it could be worth research­ing and keeping.
2. I was allowed to take the book with me to use and research for the fore­see­able future, but it wasn’t given to me. Nor should it be: it’s the sort of thing that I’d like to see become a point of pride for our library, and I want to find out every­thing I can about it so that I can per­suade the col­lege to invest in its worth. After all, Wart­burg is an ELCA school, and a 16th-century bible printed in Basel could become the “crown jewel” of our collection.