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Mar 4, 2025
Noble Fragments
The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible
Summary
One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages. In 1921, Wells’ audacity scandalized the rare-book world. The Gutenberg was the first substantial book in Europe to have been printed on a printing press. It represented the democratization of knowledge and was the Holy Grail of rare books. In Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible (Scribe, 2024), Michael Visontay describes how Wells’s gamble set off a chain of events that changed his family’s destiny.
Interviewee: Michael Visontay is the Commissioning Editor of The Jewish Independent, and has worked as a journalist and senior editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian.
Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
Your Host
Zalman Newfield
Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of a memoir, Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism, and an academic book, Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (both from Temple University Press).
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