the word

The greatest news story of the week was provided by an antique book expert who stumbled across a bona fide copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle in Sandy, Utah.

The Chronicle's owner inherited it from a great-uncle many years ago and it's been gathering dust in his attic for decades. Ken Sanders realized what he was looking at as soon as the owner pulled it out of its sack. The binding of the 1493 volume is literally falling apart, but the pages are still white, as the paper is made from rags rather than wood pulp. The words applied to the pages by letterpress are as sharp and vivid today as when they were pressed, and nearly every page is full of black-line woodblock illustrations.

The Nuremberg Chronicle was intended to serve the need for a comprehensive history of creation. It was published by Anton Koberger about 60 years after Johannes Gutenberg perfected the letter-press in the city of Mainz, and has an original Latin text by Hartmann Schedel.

However Ken Sanders, now displaying his find at his rare book shop in Salt Lake, knows that what he's got, while astonishing, isn't worth a lot of money. He doesn't really have the book, but only about a third of its pages, and there are several hundred known copies of the work, many in much better condition. But "Just the opportunity to handle something from the very beginning of the printed word and the book itself, especially, ironically, in the 21st century with all this talk of the death of the book, and here we have a book that's survived 500-plus years," Sanders said. "It's just exciting ... The value of an artifact like this to me is the least interesting part of it all."

Before the printed word there was no history for ordinary people, there was only myth and legend, and the study of history was reserved for those who had access to books and other written records After printing started, it became impossible for church or government authorities to suppress and extirpate any idea whose time had come, because they could never find and burn every last copy.

Print is speech frozen in time, and speech is a god-like power. Consider the first verse of the Gospel John, as seen here on a page letterpressed at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz in 1986. The text following the blue capital reads "In principio etat verbu," -- In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Click twice on the photo of the Gutenberg page to see the image in real size.

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