Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke up a Gutenberg Bible by Michael Visontay

Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible

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. This is the story of an Australian man’s hunt for those fragments and his family’s debt to an act of literary vandalism. In 1921, Wells’ audacity scandalized the rare-book world. Was the break-up a sacrilege or a canny deal? New Yorkers were divided. It was the Roaring Twenties, the Gatsby era of fabulous wealth. Tycoons were in a feeding frenzy to acquire items that would demonstrate their refinement. Wells marketed the pages as “Noble Fragments,” they sold like hot cakes, and he died a rich man. A century later, Sydney journalist Michael Visontay stumbled upon a mysterious legal document that linked Wells to his own family. He became obsessed by the Gutenberg’s invisible imprint on his life, and set out to track down the pages of the broken bible. Part detective story and part memoir, Noble Fragments is an expedition into the arcane world of book collectors and their eccentric passions, and a journey of discovery about how Wells’s gamble set off a chain of events that changed a family’s destiny.

About the Speaker

Australian journalist Michael Visontay has worked for over 40 years as a reporter, editor, author and lecturer. Michael was a writer and senior editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian newspapers, and is a former editor of The Jewish Independent, where he is now a senior writer. He has founded and taught journalism at several Australian universities, and is the author of six nonfiction books.