In 1790, the London bookseller Thomas Payne sold a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the earliest printed book, to George John, 2nd Earl Spencer. He charged him £370 – an enormous sum at the time, roughly equivalent to £878,000 today – as part of a package deal which included two other early theological works. As part of the deal, Payne had the old book rebound in sumptuous midnight blue goatskin. In the process, signs of earlier provenance (ownership annotations, stamps or other marks which might have revealed the Bible’s history) were carefully removed.
Nearly 230 years later, multispectral imaging (a process which captures multiple images across different wavelengths, including ultraviolet and infrared) has allowed historians to recover those lost inscriptions. My research has revealed that the Bible had belonged to the Augustinian friars of Colmar in northeastern France – a community whose library was being dismantled during the French revolution.
