The Gutenberg Bible, purchased n 1950, was the jewel of her collection which she left to St. John's Seminary upon her death in 1958.
In her bequest, she insisted the nothing be sold for 25 years, in the belief that future librarians should have flexibility but would keep the collection intact. It was a tragic mistake. The Los Angeles Archdiocese, unable to resist monetizing the valuable assets, put the entire Doheny book collection on sale in 1987. The Maruzen Co. Ltd of Tokyo snapped up the Gutenberg for $4.4 million. It is now the property of Keio University, where it has been digitized and locked away from public view.
COMMENT
The quote comes from a book review about a biography of a rare Gutenberg Bible[1]. The collector, as in other library stories, [2] imagines that her rare book collection has enough value to be guarded intact by librarians. In fact, the librarians sell the collection for money.
What's most interesting to me is the comment that the digitized book is "locked away." Librarians like to imagine that digitization makes rare and valuable things more available, not less available. But an online picture of a Gutenberg Bible is not really the same thing as a Gutenberg Bible even though the text is the same. The spooky sense of history is lost in the format transition.
[1] Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey, Tarcher Perigee, 2019.
[2] Can't. Just. Stop.
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