Ryrie’s Bible Collection Sells for $7.3m at Auction

Dan Wallace was apparently not at Sotheby’s for yesterday’s auction of Charles Ryrie’s amazing Bible collection but he reports:

A Coptic fragment with citations
from Matthew's Gospel (more)

Ryrie did not own junk. His printed books were in excellent condition. The selling price reflected this. The very first published Greek New Testament, Erasmus’s Novum Testamentum [sic; Instrumentum] (1516), sold for $24,000. The third edition (1522)—the first one to have the comma Johanneum in it—was a bargain at $5500. 

A second edition of Tyndale’s New Testament (Ryrie owned nearly a dozen of these!) sold for $75,000. There were also several copies of the Matthew’s Bible ($22,000), Coverdale Bible ($11,000–$21,000), Great Bible ($4,000–$28,000), Geneva New Testament ($30,000), Bishops Bible ($48,000), Douay-Rheims Bible ($18,000), a rare copy of the KJV ‘Wicked Bible’ (1631; so-called because the printer left out the ‘not’ in the seventh commandment; thus, “Thou shalt commit adultery”!) for $38,000.
The Luther vellum Bible sold for $260,000. It is probably the most beautiful book I’ve ever seen. This was more than double the expected sale price. 

A rare Complutensian Polyglot (only 600 were printed) came in under expectations at $70,000. This included actually the first printed Greek New Testament, though it was not published until six years after Erasmus’s work was out. The Textus Receptus—the Greek that stands behind the KJV—was essentially Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, with some wording from the CP as well as later editions of the Greek New Testament that were largely based on Erasmus.

It’s pretty amazing. Read the rest at Dan’s report here.

Sadly, I never got to see Ryrie’s collection when I was at Dallas.

Update

The whole collection sold for over 7.3 million dollars! The list from Sotheby’s is incredible. The whole collection has 197 items in it which means an average of about $37,000 per item. I hope they found good homes.