“Now here,” he said, “these may well be the most interesting pages in the volume. You ought to come closer if you want to. Look, there’s a little more space between the lines on this page than there is in the others. Those others are slightly more crowded. Now, if you take the trouble to count—use the eraser end of your pencil—you’re supposed to get forty-two lines. But what do you get there? You get forty. All these others, of course, have forty-two. But this has forty, and it’s the same length as the pages with forty-two. Here, let’s find a Q in this column. Look at the Q. Do you see a spike coming out of the top? How about over there. Now, you don’t see a spike. It’s been filed off. Let’s take a look at the capital P, you see the same thing. See the spike up there? Filed down?”
“This”—he pointed to the section with spikes—“has been thought to be the original form of the type. And this over here, this is from the second press. Gutenberg must have set up a second press, and he set it up to begin at this point in the Bible. What must have happened is that they printed for a while with this forty-line format, and then somebody said, ‘Oh, we’re getting a lot more orders, you’ve got to print more copies. This is wasting paper, we’ve got to get more type on a page.’ Well, they tried hard, and they figured out a way to get two more lines on a page. And the way they did it was to file down the ascenders and descenders [parts of lower-case letters that rise above or descend below the main body of the letter (e.g., h or y)] of certain letters. Any copy you look at, there will be a mixture. Some are just forty-two. My suspicion is that this is the oldest page in the book. Now, you see the pinholes?”
At the outside of every page, quite clearly once they have been pointed out, are the tiniest of punctures in the rag paper. “Go ahead, feel it,” Scheide said. “That’s where the pages were pinned down on the press. They pinned them right down on the press so they wouldn’t wiggle. Look, here’s another forty-line page.”
“Let me show you something else. When they went to the forty-two-line page, they gave up red printing. This here is the only red printing you will see in the book. My guess is that it took up too much time to re-ink everything. Now, one of the fun things I enjoy about this book very much is the hyphens, though the margins are wonderful too. But I have yet to find a bottom line at the end of a column where a hyphenated word goes over from page to page, or column to column, for that matter. How they avoided that is just wonderful.”
Having returned the Old Testament volume to the vault, he then brought out a manuscript known as the Blickling Homilies. “This is the only Anglo-Saxon book to be found in this hemisphere,” he said by way of introduction. “It’s about a thousand years old.” It was named for the hall in Norfolk, Blickling Hall, where it was kept for two centuries. In 1725 Humfrey Wanley wanted to buy it from William Pownall of Lincoln for the Harleian Library, but left empty-handed when the key to unlock it from a cabinet could not be found. Written almost a century before the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Blickling Homilies is a collection of sermons and narratives and offers a rare look at life in England prior to the Norman Conquest. The book is in the United States and not England because a former owner, the marquess of Lothian, was pressed for cash and sold it to Anderson Galleries in 1932. Six years later, John Scheide bought the Blickling Homilies from Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach for $38,000. After more than sixty years, the loss of this historic artifact still rankles British sensibilities. “It’s a disgrace,” Nicolas Barker said when I interviewed him at the British Library. “This is a piece of our national heritage that never should have been allowed out of the United Kingdom.”
Next from the old vault came John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a copy so pristine that it traveled back to England on loan in 1963 for the “Printing and the Mind of Man” exhibition held at the British Library. It once belonged to Robert Stayner Holford, a great English collector whose choicest items were sold to Dr. Rosenbach in 1925, and has been described as “unquestionably the finest” copy in the world. As Scheide went off to fetch yet another treasure, he talked with amusement about a Coptic fragment of the Book of Acts he once examined at the Pierpont Morgan Library with the noted bookseller Hans P. Kraus. “They had it labeled ‘a complete fragment.’ What they have is about fifteen chapters, so they call it a ‘complete fragment.’ I asked Mr. Kraus what that means, how big does a fragment have to be in order to be complete. I was teasing him a little because that particular item had gone through his hands. He said, ‘Bookseller’s talk, bookseller’s talk.’ ”
Scheide removed a tiny volume no more than four inches wide by five inches high from a compact box. With great care he located the title page of the ancient book, inscribed on parchment in a vaguely recognizable alphabet. “Well,” he said, “this is not a fragment. This is a complete Gospel of Matthew. It is from the fifth century in Coptic, but it is written in a script that is very much like what you see in Greek codices of the same period.” Remarkably, the delicate manuscript has managed to survive almost sixteen centuries in its original binding of beveled wooden boards, with bits of the original leather thongs still remaining. Scholars have determined that this codex is one of the four oldest known copies of the entire text of Matthew. Scheide began by discussing each letter in a note at the end known as the colophon or “finishing stroke” because it often includes such invaluable information as the title, author, printer, and place of printing.
“Imagine that is an M right there. The letter next to it is an a. And then this circle with a line through it, that’s a theta, which sounds like ‘th.’ Then there’s an a, I, o, and that c would be used as an s. So what that says is Mathios—Matthew, you see. And before that comes the word kata, which means ‘according to Matthew.’ And this word up here is the word for “gospel,” evangeleion, ‘the evangel,’ where the word evangelist comes from. So what you have here is a complete fifth-century Coptic manuscript of the Gospel According to Matthew, an unusually early copy. In fact it has some things in it that were left out of later versions.”
After returning the codex to its proper space, Scheide came back with “something really remarkable,” a 1,100-year-old Carolingian manuscript with breathtaking calligraphic script, a book “about a hundred years older than the Blickling Homilies.” When he was done discussing that treasure, he went to the vault and got yet another rare and marvelous book.
• • •
In 1947, the librarian of Princeton University, Julian P. Boyd, wrote a “summary view” of the Scheide library, then housed in a remote region of northwest Pennsylvania near the Allegheny River that once played a prominent role in the emerging oil industry. “Some of the greatest of the world’s books are to be found in the Scheide library, but all of them, even the greatest, have assumed new dignity and meaning because of the manner in which they were assembled and because of the purposes for which this was done.” When Boyd wrote that, the library had been in private hands through two full generations. It would become even greater during the third.
William Taylor Scheide, the founder, was born in Philadelphia in 1847 and went “west” twenty years later to seek his fortune in the Pennsylvania oilfields. While others got rich drilling wells, he determined that money was to be made by transporting petroleum to major depots and refineries through pipelines. By the time he was thirty-three, Scheide was general manager of a system that had consolidated the whole network of oil pipelines, and at the age of forty-two he retired, even though John D. Rockefeller urged him to reconsider. He decided instead to augment his library, which for many years contained the only books to be found for miles around Titusville. As a service to his neighbors he maintained an open-shelf policy. He had forms printed up for borrowers with spaces for date, title, and signature, along with an admonition at the bottom: “to be returned in good order in one week from date.”
On May 1, 1889, Scheide left for four months of book buying in Europe. Among his purchases were hundreds of medieval documents, including contracts, papal bulls, invoices, indulgences, deeds, and w
ills. Toward the end of his life, he cited his coming of age “amid the passions of the Civil War” as the reason he undertook the study of history. What resulted from his curiosity was a library that, Boyd wrote, “would have done credit to any professional scholar, but for William T. Scheide to create it in the time and place and circumstances was evidence enough that, whatever else he was, he was first and foremost a student.” More significant was that Scheide wrote “one of the most interesting chapters in the annals of American book-collecting” and “laid the foundation for an even greater library.” Once, he chided his son John for telling Mrs. Scheide how much money he had spent for an acquisition. “Your dear Mother absolutely cannot understand the value of books, although at times she tries, and so feels hurt when the subject of their cost arises. She knows their purchase is a wicked folly and fears the inevitable consequences for us.”
When John Scheide received that letter in 1904, he was twenty-nine years old and living at a sanitorium in Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks recovering from tuberculosis. Though only eight years out of Princeton University, John Scheide had been forced by illness to quit the oil business. At his father’s death in 1907, he not only took on the management of the family estate but also assumed responsibility for the Titusville library and conducted a thorough inventory. There were about 2,500 volumes in all, most of them acquired for the knowledge they possessed, though a number were rare, including some early manuscript material and several incunabula, among them Thomas Aquinas’s De Veritate, printed by Nicholas Jenson in Venice in 1480; Euclid’s Elementa Geometriae, Venice, 1482; Justinian’s Institutiones, Basel, 1476; and a Nuremberg Chronicle.
It is uncertain when John Scheide began to collect in earnest, though Lathrop C. Harper recalled selling him a Bible in 1910. Great editions of the Bible would be represented, but the overall scheme was constantly refined. John Scheide once credited a Princeton professor’s comment that modern history had been shaped by the invention of printing and the discovery of America with setting his overall theme. He came to know books with the soul of a connoisseur and the eye of a bibliographer, yet he never spent frivolously. Before long, he was buying books from Dr. Rosenbach. Their first transaction came in 1914, when Scheide wrote to authorize bids for four titles being offered in an upcoming session of the Huth sale in London, to be attended by Dr. Rosenbach’s brother, Philip Rosenbach. “I am quite anxious to secure these items,” John Scheide wrote Rosenbach. “I assume of course that your brother will endeavor to secure them as cheaply as he can.”
On July 29, 1914, Rosenbach replied that only one of the four lots, a tract by Martin Luther, had been obtained. “Books that are desirable are selling high at auction despite the hard times and the threatened wars,” he explained. “It is curious that while other securities are dropping, books and other literary property are selling higher than ever before.” Scheide remained frugal, as a letter from Rosenbach four and a half years later demonstrates. “I have just returned from the Jones Sale, and certainly regret that I was unable to secure any of the items for which you kindly sent us the bids.” Rosenbach itemized what the lots went for, and in several cases identified the buyers.
Despite these setbacks, spirited bargaining continued between Scheide and Rosenbach. After receiving a copy of the Icelandic Bible on approval in 1923, Scheide wrote that he would be pleased to purchase it “if we can agree on the price.” After examining the book, he noted how it not only “lacks the blank leaf between the first and second parts,” but that about one and a quarter inches had “been cropped off its height” and another five eighths of an inch trimmed “from the side margins.” He also found evidence of repairs and the absence of some text. “On these accounts, it does seem to me that the price you quoted of $485 is high, and I shall be glad to hear what figure you are willing to place on it.” The answer that came back acknowledged the “imperfections,” but noted that a copy “with no repairs and all the blanks would fetch considerably more.” As a consequence, the price was firm, and Scheide relented.
Another friendly exchange developed a few months later, when Rosenbach wrote Scheide that he was sending to Titusville “by express today the famous copy of the first edition of Homer, 1488,” one of “the finest examples in existence,” altogether a “perfect” copy. Rosenbach said that though he had listed the book at $2,200, “I am making you a special price of $1,950.” Scheide wrote back that it “is indeed a delicious copy, one that delights the heart to handle, but is not the matchless copy that your enthusiasm paints it.” Indeed, he found that the copy, far from being perfect, “lacks the famous blank leaf EX just before the text begins, which both the Hoe and Huth had, the presence of which was noted with some care in the sale catalogues.” He also reported a height discrepancy of a quarter inch. Those reservations notwithstanding, Scheide allowed nevertheless that he was “glad to have it,” and asked for a statement so “I may send my check.”
Banter over an editio princeps of Homer and an Icelandic Bible was one matter, but when the prospect of installing a Gutenberg Bible in Titusville presented itself a few months later, the stakes were raised. Writing to Rosenbach on January 3, 1924, Scheide mentioned a recent conversation and recalled, almost as an afterthought, how “we had a hurried word together” on the subject of the Ellsworth-Brinley copy of the Gutenberg Bible, which Rosenbach had acquired a few months earlier. “I happen just now to be in funds, and in a position to talk with you on a strictly cash basis,” Scheide continued, “and I am wondering whether you have anything you care to say to me in this connection.”
The two men already had been doing business for ten years, mostly through the mails. Scheide now suggested that perhaps this was a good time for Rosenbach to make his first trip to Titusville, an invitation that was readily accepted. “I shall, of course, bring with me the Gutenberg Bible,” Rosenbach wrote on February 5, 1924. Scheide replied that if the volumes were too cumbersome to bring along as baggage, he “might care to send them on in advance” by express. “My library is supposed to be as nearly fireproof as modern structural methods can make it, and in addition, I have a fireproof safe inside of it”—the same safe that is still used today in Princeton by his son. There is no discussion in these letters of money. Apparently Rosenbach took a train to Titusville, showed Scheide the two volumes, and stated a firm price of $46,000. That, according to the Rosenbach Company sales book, is how much Scheide paid.
In 1932, Rosenbach offered Scheide a copy of Rationale divinorum officiorum, a handbook prepared in the fifteenth century by Guillielmus Durandus for the clergy in celebrating the Mass and known commonly as the Durandus. It was printed in Mainz by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer on October 6, 1459. “This magnificent copy is printed on vellum and is usually regarded as one of the greatest pieces of printing after the Gutenberg Bible,” Rosenbach wrote. “It is the earliest procurable.” Scheide wrote back that even though the Durandus “makes my mouth water to think of it,” the continuing poor economic situation of the Depression forced him to decline. Several decades later, Scheide’s son William not only secured a copy of the Durandus, he obtained the “other two” books Dr. Rosenbach had maintained were “unprocurable,” the Mainz Psalters of 1457 and 1459. William Scheide was trained as a musicologist, and his acquisitions also included autograph scores by Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach.
In 1990, the Grolier Club marked “125 years of growth” of the Scheide family library with a major exhibition of selected items. Among Bibles were Martin Luther’s September Testament and a twelfth-century French manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew once owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps. The Aldine Aristotle, 1494, the pages “completely untrimmed” and once the property of a sixteenth-century king of France, was among the incunabula. Americana included an uncut copy of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution, and a letter book kept by General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. A 1549 Book of Common Prayer and three texts printed in Mexico eighty years before the production of the
Bay Psalm Book, formerly owned by Robert Hoe, were displayed as well.
Paul Needham, formerly curator of rare books at the Pierpont Morgan Library and, later, the head of the Rare Books Division of Sotheby’s, wrote in 1976 that the Scheide Library “is one of only five libraries where those three greatest monuments of the first years of printing, the Gutenberg Bible, the 1457 Psalter and the 1459 Psalter, keep company together. Its associates in this honor are the British Library, the Rylands Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek.… Those who have witnessed the unerring ease with which the present owner finds his way through the 42-line Bible or the Psalters quickly understands that this tradition is still alive; the books are used and read.”
Another book frequently attributed to Gutenberg’s press, the Catholicon of Johannes Balbus, is represented in the Scheide Library as well. Of particular interest here is the note inserted in the colophon. Translated in 1936 by Margaret Stillwell, the colophon for this book reads:
With the help of Omnipotent God, at Whose very nod the tongues of infants are made eloquent, and Who often reveals to the humble what He withholds from the wise—this excellent book, Catholicon, has been printed in the goodly city of Mainz, in the glorious German nation (which, by the Grace of God, the Almighty has deigned to prefer and exalt above other nations of the earth by gracious gift and so lofty a light of genius), and it has been brought to completion in the year of our Lord’s incarnation, 1460—not by means of reed, stylus, or quill, but with the miraculous and harmonious concurrence of punches and types cast in moulds. Hence to Thee, O Holy Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, let praise and honour be given Thee, Three Persons in One God, Holy Trinity. To the single glory of the Church let universal praise be given for this book, and let all tongues laud the Blessed Virgin Mary, henceforth, and forevermore. TO GOD BE THE THANKS.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 34
