Rare Bibles for sale, but chance to see is free at Palazzo

What’s the price of salvation? How about $180,000, give or take?

OK, maybe that’s not the price of salvation. But it does happen to be the price of a very old, very rare and very pricey edition of the Aitken Bible, which surely contains some good advice about attaining salvation.

And if $180,000 seems a bit steep, don’t worry. Through June 30, fans of the Bible, rare books and just generally cool things can check out the Aitken Bible and a selection of other antique religious books for free at the Las Vegas gallery of Bauman Rare Books at the Shoppes at Palazzo.

The exhibition, “In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible Through the Ages,” features rare Bibles and holy books that includes volumes such as the first Roman Catholic New Testament in English, a rare second-edition Book of Mormon and a microform Bible fragment that literally went to the moon.

It turns out that Bibles are much coveted (forgive the word) among rare book collectors. Mary Olsson, a sales representative at Bauman Rare Books, says that might stem in part from the respect with which people hold the Bible.

Bibles “are passed down to generations: This was Great-Grandma Esther’s Bible,’ or whatever the case may be,” she explains. “It’s a very popular request among people who come in: ‘Do you have any old Bibles?’ ”

In addition, the Bible remains one of “the most published and printed books” in the world, Olsson says. However, although plenty of old and dusty Bibles can be found in garages, basements and attics just about everywhere, those generally aren’t the ones collectors tend to (again, forgive the word) lust after.

The most valuable Bibles “generally have some sort of importance in history,” Olsson explains. Even in the case of the old editions featuring the venerable King James translation — the 1611 translation many Christians still use today — “obviously it’s a first edition or an early edition that is significant.”

Olsson adds that it’s because the Bible is such a common book that “we kind of really stop looking at them past the mid-1800s. We have plenty of people who come in and go, ‘I have an old Bible,’ and they rattle off a year, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a 1914 or a 1960, for the most part they’re not rare and collectible.”

For some bibliophiles, the appeal of rare Bibles is associated with the Bible’s religious significance. Others, Olsson says, are intrigued by the role the Bible has played in the development of Western culture.

Spiritual import aside, the Bible is “a significant work,” Olsson says. For generations, it was “the foundation of what everybody read and studied.

“Even in our current society and culture, there are so many references to the Bible, and I think we’re not even aware of them.”

According to Olsson, the development of a merchant class around the 15th century helped to make book ownership important. After Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press began to revolutionize publishing during the 1490s, owning a Bible even became “kind of a status symbol.”

And, she says, “if people could afford a book, the one book they bought was a Bible.”

The exhibition includes significant volumes ranging in value from a few thousand to many thousands of dollars. At the upper end of that spectrum is the Aitken Bible, the first complete English Bible printed in the United States, which is valued at about $180,000.

According to Olsson, it was printed in 1782 by Robert Aitken, a printer from Scotland who moved to the United States, settled in Philadelphia and eventually “became the printer for the Continental Congress.”

In 1777, Aitken produced a domestically printed English language edition of the New Testament (previously, only English Bibles printed in England were available in the Colonies). In 1782, he produced a complete English language Bible, for which he received an endorsement from the Continental Congress.

Olsson notes that some Bible collectors prefer pristine editions, without the annotations, inscriptions and notes that many Bible owners incorporate into their books. Other collectors find such owner-entered marks interesting and may even try to track the book’s journey throughout the years.

The Aitken Bible on display at Bauman is a Bible of the latter sort. It’s inscribed on the front fly leaves with the name of its owner, William Mahany, a Quaker who lived in Chester County, Pa., who notes that he had possession of the book during the late 1780s. On the back fly leaves are Mahany’s notations about the death in 1812 of his wife and daughter.

The Aitken Bible was intended to be, to at least some degree, a mass-market Bible priced for the average person to buy, Olsson says.

After Gutenberg, earning enough money to own a book “would obviously take some time,” she says. “It was definitely limited to the aristocracy, the nobility, when it started.

“But within 10 or 20 years, when Gutenberg basically no longer had this kind of monopoly on the printed press and the printing press is open across Europe, (books) became mass-produced and became an everyday thing and something more and more people can buy.”

Also featured in the exhibit is an edition of the Macklin Bible printed in 1800 and valued at $21,000. The seven-volume work is significant “because of its illustrations,” Olsson says, which feature depictions of biblical scenes and characters by “some of the finest English painters of the time.”

Another volume in the exhibit is a Rheims New Testament, the first Roman Catholic translation of the New Testament into English, which was printed in 1582 and is valued at about $24,000. Olsson says the Rheims represented a sort of countermove to Protestant translations in the vernacular that were in use at the time.

The exhibit also includes a two-volume first edition of the first Hebrew Bible published in the United States in 1814, valued at $32,000. According to Olsson, the work owes its creation to Jonathan Horowitz, a printer from Amsterdam who arrived in Philadelphia in 1812 “with a font of Hebrew type.”

Also featured in the exhibition is a second-edition copy of the Book of Mormon, published in 1837 and valued at about $60,000. It’s significant, Olsson says, in that it’s the first edition of the book to list Joseph Smith as the text’s translator.

Besides Bibles, the exhibition features other holy books. Among them are a Marian Book of Hours, a Roman Catholic devotional published in 1425 and valued at $38,000, and an Ethiopian prayer book published in 1825 and valued at $6,000 (and includes the leather, shoulder-strapped carrying case used to protect it).

And in a Space Age twist on antiquarian books, the exhibit features a 50-page fragment of a King James microform Bible that went to the moon with Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. The fragment went to the moon under the auspices of a group called the Apollo Prayer League Committee and traveled aboard Apollo 14’s lunar module, which touched down in the Fra Mauro Highlands on Feb. 5, 1971.

The microform fragment is valued at about $13,500. Of about 100 microform Bibles that went to the moon, the fragment is from one of only about a dozen that “were flight certified by Edgar Mitchell,” Olsson says.

By the way: How might one store a fragment of a microform Bible that went to the moon? In a modern-day Faberge egg, of course, complete with jeweled embellishments.

All of the volumes seen in the exhibition are for sale. But until they’re sold, Southern Nevadans are, Olsson says, welcome to stop by and take a look at them.

The goal of the exhibit is to “showcase that these collections exist, that these books are still out there,” she says. “The world is becoming more digital. We’ve got e-readers growing and expanding. But books are still important and they’re still desirable.”

The exhibit is, Olsson adds, “a great way to showcase the preservation of history, literature and books, and beautiful art objects.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@review journal.com or 702-383-0280.