Salvation is a lot more expensive than it used to be!
One of the online book sales consortiums releases its priciest sales once a month, and for September, the Good Book brought a heavenly price for the seller. The hand-tooled bible is old enough that Christopher Columbus could have taken it along on his voyage to the new world.
Printed in 1491, the so-called “Poor Man’s Bible” sold through American Book Exchange for $26,200. Obviously, it isn’t a poor man’s bible any longer, but at the time of its printing, this volume was among the first published in a much smaller and less ornate binding – more affordable for the common man.
Several Bibles made the top 10 of ABE’s most expensive books sold, but the top fiction honors went to a first edition copy of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” The 19th century volume brought $25,000 in a private sale.
Nowhere near that price, but an interesting book just the same is an 1883 German language bible we have in the shop currently with a binding that looks like it was carved from the trunk of an oak tree. The heavy volume is filled with beautiful engravings as seen in the accompanying image.
Some of the earliest Bibles printed in America were done in Western Pennsylvania, where German immigrants settled at the invitation of William Penn. Publishers in the region continued to print in the German language to accommodate the large settlements in Chester and Lancaster counties that still relied on their native tongue. Obviously, the use of German was prevalent enough to require the publishing of German language books well after the Civil War.
Somehow, one of the Good Books from that area found its way to Indian Territory, and eventually Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where it proudly sits anticipating its 130th birthday.