THE LOST GUTENBERG The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey

Coleen Marlo is an experienced and empathetic narrator. This audiobook history of one beautifully preserved copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the world's first and most valuable printed book, is a capsule study of the peculiar passion that motivates book collectors--what one critic has called "a gentle madness." While the listener discovers that this particular Gutenberg was never really "lost" and that its passage from owner to owner over the centuries wasn't all that astonishing, the author finds her narrative center in the trade in and preservation of rare books. That, more than the biographies of the owners themselves, is the chief interest here, and the real drama of this story is in the auction houses and the acclimatized vaults and cases where some of our greatest treasures live on. Marlo delivers it all beautifully. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2019]