Gutenberg Bible, Spanish Jewskin

When last week, the Senate voted as the House had done (TIME, June 23) to spend $1,500,000 of the public money for the Vollbehr Collection of Incunabula, many a U. S. citizen wondered what "Vollbehr" and "Incunabula" might be. Citizens who inquired of their local librarians or other authorities, learned the following:

Vollbehr is eccentric German tycoon-- Dr. Otto H. F. Vollbehr, onetime chemist, onetime China sugar trader. Injured in a Turkish railroad accident, he was advised to adopt a hobby to aid his recuperation, chose collecting European books printed before 1500 A. D.

Incunabula are literally "cradle-books," published in the infancy of printing. First and most famed of Incunabula are the Gutenberg Bibles, printed in and after 1456. A Gutenberg Bible is in Dr. Vollbehr's collection; there are 3,000 other items, including the first cookbook, the first book on music, the first on surgery, etc.. etc. Also, there is a book bound in the skin of a Spanish Jew persecuted for religious heresy, and many another curio.

The collection came to the U. S. on the invitation of Chicago's Cardinal Mundelein who wanted his guests at the 1926 Eucharistic Congress to see it. After the Congress, Dr. Vollbehr took his books on the road, showed them in many U. S. cities with great pomp & circumstance, hoped to sell them to a college or tycoon.

He then valued them--and so did other experts--at $3,000,000. He sold 400 duplicates to the late Henry E. Huntington for $1,250,000. The last Gutenberg Bible sold (by Dr. Abraham S. Wolf Rosenbach to Mrs. Edward Stephen Harkness) brought the thumping price of $120,000.

At last, despairing of finding anyone willing to pay its acknowledged worth, Showman Vollbehr offered the collection to the U. S. Government for the Library of Congress. Said he in effect: "I cut the price in half. Let the U. S. donate $1,500,000. Then I will donate $1,500,000."

So impressed were Congressmen that the bill to purchase the Incunabula passed the House without a dissenting vote. In the Senate, Massachusetts' Gillett was the only possible obstacle. He said: "Great museums and libraries and collections of pictures and jewels have in the past been purchased by monarchs, who have thereby made their cities celebrated. . . . In this country that has always been left to private individuals. . . . But I have no doubt this expenditure will not only give us some of the rarest and most splendid books in the world but will also stimulate prospective donors. . . . And so, although I think the precedent a bad one, I will not object to the passage of the bill."

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