The Bible : that is, the Holy Scriptures conteined in the Old and New Testament ...
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910.
PML 17197.1
Jesse Erickson:
Here we have a meticulously crafted piece by Anne Cornwallis Leigh, a member of the Staffordshire gentry, dating back to around 1640.
In a May 1910 letter from F. A. Wheeler, the bookseller responsible for several Bibles in Morgan’s collection, to the Morgan’s first director, Belle da Costa Greene, Wheeler expresses great admiration for this piece. The letter reads:
I am sending you by this mail the photographs of the magnificent Cornwallis family Bible 1599 which Mr. Gordon Duff describes in a letter to me as ‘probably one of the finest specimens of an English embroidered cover now in existence.’ The volume is almost as fresh as the day it was bound … Luckily it was in a little ‘mixed’ sale and I had to give only £250 to secure it. I shall hope to get £500 for it unless Mr. Morgan takes it. (F. A. Wheeler to Belle da Costa Greene, 4 May 1910).