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landlady's 18th generation back relative, Melancthon, the sidekick of Luther.

In essence, it was the first accepted complete Protestant Bible, and the first edition of it.
It was in good condition for a printing of 1545 with a Durer print of Martin Luther in the flyleaf!
I told the owner to go to a rare book dealer of HER choice and get an appraisal and I would buy it at that price. We did that.

One of the most important things in my life had been the Lutheran College I attended, ROANOKE COLLEGE, so I had a protective plexiglas presentation case made for it and gave it to the College. The Chancellor of Germany flew in to see it!

The second incident of great interest was the arrival of a beat-up old car in my rare bookstore lot, and a very old gentleman getting out and telling me he had 'an old hymnal to sell'...it was mot a hymnal but a huge and extremely rare Book Of Hours Of St. Didier, an illuminated Ms of 384 pages in perfect condition.

He wanted $200 for it, and when I explained that it was PRICELESS, he became angry, and said "Just give me the damn $200 bucks!"

I did, and whispered to his wife that when I sold it, I would bring one-half the proceeds less his $200 to their singlewide trailer in a nearby village. I did. And when he received the check of many thousands, he almost died of an attack! The wonderful book had been front-paged and had been bought by a retired Archbishop who wanted to restore it to the monastery of St. Didier in France where it had been stolen by th Germans in the war of 1870.

The third and last anecdote started with an accented phone call from a Count _____ who wanted to bring me a "Bible" that he had bought in Soweto, South Africa. He did bring it, and had heard of me from a card I'd left with a London dealer. My Count was Italian from Abyssinia, and had found this several hundred page small format book, bound with cat gut and having cedar board covers in a trash bookshop in Soweto for $6.

I bought it on sight, and after trials and tribulations over a period of six years or so, carbon dating of the goat stomach pages, the two inks, the berry-juice portraits of a black Christ ON the Cross, and A black baby in the manger, it turned out to be done in 950 AD, give or take fifty years!

A very devoted and religious collector had paid for those carbon datings, and has the book in a case in his Christian bookstore. It is beyond price as it was done in the time of St. Simon Stylitis, the founder of the Coptic movement.

It is nice to find first editions of Hemingway or Margaret Mitchell or Willa Cather.

But the most fun is to KNOW that something at the beginning of printing, or a thousand or two thousand years before THAT exists and can be found. And KEPT! Or sold!

Learn more about this author, William Cobbs.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

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