13. Biblia Pauperum – $2.42 million ($5 million in 2016)
Next up is a book that has all of the value of a remarkable book. One, it is historical. Two, it is art. And three, it is biblical.
Dated back to the year of 1460 until 1470, this Bible reflects two major changes in the human’s history. The first one is how our way of documenting. Back in the prehistoric era, human used drawings to tell a story. Nowadays, we use words. And the Biblia Pauperum used pictures and little words, sort of the combination between the two eras.
The second one is the Old and New Testaments. This bible visualizes the typological correspondences between those two.
The Gotha-Doheny copy was printed in Netherlands. Quaritch bought it for $2.42 million in October 1987. Today, that is worth around $5 million. It is the only copy in the United States.
