Where would we book collectors be without our book collecting miracles? No self-respecting collector will deny having experienced a miracle or two in pursuing an elusive rarity — I’m talking about divine intervention, a little help from the bibliophile-goddess in fulfilling our quest. The first true collecting miracle I experienced was in the 1990s when I visited a book auction house for the first time.
‘Giri’s Book Auction House’ was a little known operation in Mysuru run out of a large garage that I stumbled on by chance when chaperoning some school children on a field trip. We were on our way back to Bengaluru, but not being in any rush to get back, made a leisurely stop for tiffin at a hotel that announced itself as “deluxe”.
Real miracle
I wolfed down my dosa and coffee and stepped out for a cigarette. I noticed a signboard tacked by the side of a garage that announced ‘Giri’s Book Auction House’. I dashed in quickly to check it out, and found an auction about to start. I hastily inspected the dozen or so book lots, each carefully numbered. Disappointingly, they were mostly old law books bound in leatherette. There was, however, one small lot of vintage children’s books and comics, mainly Biggles, William, Billy Bunter and Indrajal titles from the 60s that sweetly smelled the way all old comics do when you press them to your face and sniff.
I decided that if this lot came up early enough, I would bid — and it did, and I jumped in. Apart from me, only two others were interested; the bid began at ₹50 and after a quick chase, was knocked down to me for ₹550. When I went to pay up in the next room where the sold lots were being held, adding to the total the 15% buyer’s premium, (this is how auction houses make their profit) I discovered to my dismay as the clerk handed over the books that I had bid on the wrong lot. I had misremembered the lot number, and was now in possession of what looked like a bunch of heavy tomes — those damn law books!
Returns weren’t acceptable, so I was stuck with them. On the bus back, the four volumes rode with me on my lap, and I began flipping through them with barely any interest at all. Though covered in the same faux leather as the other three, one volume wasn’t a law book at all but what looked like an old Tamil Bible. The more I examined it, the more excited I got: this was the 1714 Tranquebar Bible, one of the earliest printed books in India.
This was a find in itself, but what lay inside this volume was the real miracle. Laid loosely into the book was an incunabula leaf: a page from an early printed book, probably from between 1455 and 1488.
Examples of incunabulum are not uncommon, though they can be expensive to acquire, but something about this particular leaf — a printer’s device or trademark printed in red ink showing two heraldic shields suspended from a branch of a tree — looked tantalisingly familiar. (Some of you may have already guessed what I was looking at.)
As soon as I reached home, I pulled out my copy of Alfred Pollard’s seminal book, An Essay on Colophons , and hurriedly searched for the page that resembled what I had seen in the loosely laid leaf. And there it was: the Fust and Schoeffer leaf with a colophon showing the first ever printer’s device. Peter Schoeffer had been Gutenberg’s apprentice, and later, along with Johann Fust, printed the incandescently beautiful Mainz Psalter , which carried the first printer’s colophon and device.
Of all the incunabulum leaves one could possibly find, I had hit the jackpot. Though this colophon leaf was probably from a book printed later by Schoeffer, (this one was printed on paper, not vellum, and lacked the coloured Lombardic initial) it was still a splendid and priceless bibliographical rarity, rarely found as a loose leaf.
More than luck
I could only presume that the owner of the Tranquebar Bible, who had managed to somehow snag this rarest of rare manuscript leaves, must have been a Dutch missionary, and perhaps a collector, who had lived or visited India some 200 years ago. But how it had made its way to this auction house, with the leaf intact, would remain a mystery. I recognised it for the rarity it was because I had just then become interested in book history with a focus on the origins of printing with moveable type.
What would have been the fate of the Tranquebar Bible and this Schoeffer leaf if someone else had won this lot? Would they have eventually recognised it, or would it have just languished under a pile of books, or been simply thrown away? I couldn’t help feeling that this volume was almost steered towards me. I had, after all, not even wanted to bid for it.
Some people — especially those the collecting community likes to sometimes cheekily refer to as “the non-bibliographic public” — might scoff and dismiss these miracles as coincidence or serendipity, but the collector knows that she needs more than luck to acquire antiquarian gems. She needs what the charming bibliophile-writer Seymour Adelman once referred to as “a little help from heaven”.
The author is a bibliophile, columnist and critic.
