The 1920s desecration of a Gutenberg Bible shocked the US – but miraculously gave a Jewish family new life in Australia

It was a brazen act of extreme literary vandalism that desecrated one of the world’s most valuable books. But it also allowed a family of Holocaust survivors to forge a new life in Australia.

The extraordinary tale was uncovered by the author and journalist Michael Visontay while researching his family history during Covid lockdown and has now been published as a book, Noble Fragments.

It tells how 100 years ago a New York bookseller pulled apart a Gutenberg Bible – one of only 49 thought to still be in existence – and sold the individual pages for a fortune.

“It was the holy grail of rare books,” Visontay says.

“Noble fragments was a fancy term to cover up the fact that what was done was literary sacrilege.

“To break up any book is offensive to most people, but to break up a Gutenberg Bible, that was a crime against history.”

Visontay’s discovery began with a mystery surrounding the second of his grandfather’s three wives, a woman the family appeared to have erased from existence. There were no photos of Olga, no indication of where she was buried, and an unspoken family rule that she was never to be discussed or acknowledged.

Yet rummaging through old papers following the death of his mother five years ago, Visontay came across Olga’s name in what appeared to be a legal document demanding money.

Also mentioned in the document was a name Visontay had never heard before: Gabriel Wells.

A simple Google search set the writer on an entirely new trajectory of his research.

Visontay discovered online a 1946 obituary for Wells who, he learned, had been one of the most influential antiquarian book dealers in the US in the first half of the 20th century.

A brilliant and inconceivable act

Wells, born Gabriel Weiss, had abandoned his wife and home country of Hungary and resettled in Boston in 1894. The “gilded age”, as it was later to be called, was a time when rare books were becoming a coveted commodity. By the time the “Gatsby” era of wealth emerged in the 1920s, money from oil and the railroads boom meant nouveau riche families needed to fill their sprawling mansions with the hallmarks of wealth and good breeding; art for their walls and books for the shelves in their vast libraries.

Wells rubbed shoulders with Rothschilds and Vanderbilts. He famously paid US$200,000 (about $3.6m in today’s money) for the right to print a limited run of Mark Twain’s definitive writings, and lost the world’s most expensive copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, encrusted with more than 1,000 precious gems, while transporting it from Britain to the US on the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

But Wells’s most noted achievement was his acquisition of a Gutenberg Bible in the early 1920s and, in a brilliant and inconceivable act of entrepreneurship/vandalism, broke it up and sold the individual pages, as well as some complete books of the Bible. Wells claimed the “noble fragments” – the term he used to market the individual leaves – was a victory for egalitarianism, like the 15th-century book itself that heralded the dawn of secular literacy and mass printing. For the equivalent of about US$1,500 in today’s money, anyone could own a piece of the world’s most valuable book.

The connoisseurs were outraged. The press were fascinated. The public were captivated. The pages sold like hot cakes.

“Wells justified his actions by saying the book was already missing too many pages to sell it as a complete Bible,” Visontay says.

“But this was just not true. A number of the other Gutenbergs were missing more leaves than his one. So really it was a marketing ploy – break it up and maximise the returns.”

Tragedy and family turmoil

With one piece of the puzzle solved, Visontay’s next challenge was to find out how this literary vandal came to be entangled in his family.

Like Wells, the Weiszmann family were Hungarian Jews, living in Gyöngyös, a village about 100km from Budapest, where the family owned the local delicatessen. When Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, Pali and Sara Weiszmann, Visontay’s grandparents, and his father, Ivan, then 14, were rounded up and transported to concentration camps – Pali to Mauthausen in Austria, Ivan and his mother to Auschwitz in Poland.

Sara perished, but her husband and son survived, reuniting in Gyöngyös at the war’s end.

The traumatised family picked up the remnants of their lives. Their home had been destroyed during the war, but the deli was still standing. Father and son reopened the business and rented rooms in a house owned by a woman who had also lost her spouse in the Holocaust, Olga Illovfsky.

Within a year Olga Illovfsky had become Olga Weiszmann, Pali’s second wife, much to the anguish of the teenaged Ivan.

“Pali told his son that he was lonely … but it was a very devastating piece of news for my father, because he’d been in the concentration camp with his mother,” Visontay says. “He had lost her, and then there was just two of them, and then when my grandfather announced that he was marrying Olga, well, Ivan blamed her for reconfiguring the family and he felt left out.”

With Hungary under communist rule, the Weiszmanns, now using the surname Visontai, watched as their delicatessen was confiscated for the second time. They decided to flee, planning their relocation to the US from a migrant camp in Italy. Ivan’s visa was accepted, but Pali’s and Olga’s were not. The family settled on Australia instead. In 1952 they arrived in Sydney, and before long were running a thriving business in the only field of endeavour Pali had ever known.

The iconic Minerva deli in Sydney’s bohemian Kings Cross of the 1950s sold exotic continental smallgoods most Australians had never heard of before the war. Locals and the growing Hungarian diaspora in Sydney came as much for the atmosphere and the camaraderie as the salamis and the goulash. The delicatessen thrived and so did the Visontai, now Visontay, family.

The Gutenberg legacy

So how did a family devastated by the Holocaust and financially ruined by the communists prosper so quickly in Australia?

Some time between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Olga, already married to Pali, inherited a small fortune from a childless uncle she had barely known – Gabriel Wells.

A portion of the fortune Wells amassed through his desecration of the world’s most valuable Bible had bankrolled a traumatised Jewish family’s flight from Hungary and provided the foundation for a new life on the other side of the world.

“Gabriel Wells breaking up this Bible had set off a chain of events that gave my family a rebirth, a second lease of life,” Visontay says.

Less than a year after the Minerva deli opened, Olga died suddenly from a stroke. Cousins who had co-inherited the Wells fortune sent a letter of demand to the Visontays in Sydney, seeking the return of Olga’s inheritance to their families.

Overwhelmed by the legal might of the challenge, Pali and Ivan decided not to fight the case.

It would take them the next five years to get their small business back to where it had begun, and Olga’s name – and the part she played in the family’s newfound safety and prosperity – was expunged.

There is a paradoxical footnote to the Gabriel Wells side of the saga. Yes, the rogue antiquarian built his wealth from an act of literary vandalism. But the noble fragments scandal enabled a number of institutions and universities to acquire pages missing from their own editions of the Gutenberg Bible, including some Wells donated to the New York Public Library.

It is believed about 180 copies of the book were printed and first made available in 1455. Today there are 49 in existence – only 21 remain wholly intact.

Visontay has so far established the location of 120 “noble fragments” sold by his relative a century ago, including 11 that made their way to Australia.

• Noble Fragments by Michael Visontay is published by Scribe. The author will be in conversation with Caroline Baum at Sydney’s Gleebooks on Wednesday 27 November at 6pm