The Mannheim copy of the Gutenberg Bible is perhaps better known as the "Noble Fragments" copy whose leaves were dispersed by Gabriel Wells in late 1921. He had purchased at Sotheby's a two-volume set, which lacked fifty three leaves and had a further ninety-six leaves mutilated, their decorative manuscript initials removed.
Its existence was recorded by Wilhelm Heinse in 1789, along with a copy of the 1462 48-line bible. It seems likely to have been in the collection since the mid 1750s, when Mannheim records noted a bible with Gothic lettering as “mutilata.” The copy was apparently bound in the arms of Countess Palatine Elizabeth Auguste of Sulzbach. Both she and her husband Carl Theodor maintained separate libraries, and due to their strained and seemingly deeply unhappy relationship they lived apart from one another in their later years. Maria Auguste died in 1794, and in 1799 Carl Theodor followed. The 100,000 volume Sulzbach library was transferred to the Bavarian Court Library in Munich. In 1803, two more copies of the bible were transferred to the Court Library from recently dissolved monasteries of the Benedictines at Andechs and the Augustinian Canons Regular at Rottenbuch. The Andechs copy, still in Munich today, was complete, and the Rottenbuch copy (now at Fondation Bodmer in Switzerland ) apparently lacked several leaves. Four leaves from the Mannheim copy were removed and placed in the Rottenbuch copy, likely during this period . The Bavarian Court Library, having been recently refashioned as the Royal Library at Munich, sold the Mannheim copy as a defective duplicate to Robert Curzon in 1832, in whose family it remained until its sale to Wells at Sotheby’s in 1920. Wells broke the bible completely, selling it leaf by leaf or, in some cases, as complete books of the Bible.
This website is an attempt to locate extant leaves from this copy, and to collate their images into a digitally reconstructed working copy.