Sauer Bible
The Sauer Bible is a Luther Bible printed in Pennsylvania in 1743 .
Johann Christoph Sauer (Saur), a tailor from Ladenburg in the Electoral Palatinate, trained in Germantown, Pennsylvania, practically as an autodidact to become a printer. As he was close to pietist and Anabaptist groups, he imported and sold copies of the radical pietist Berleburg Bible .
His business idea was to reprint Canstein's Bible himself and to add the appendices to the Berleburg Bible (3rd and 4th Book of Ezra , 3rd Book of the Maccabees ) , which are popular with Pietists . This not entirely orthodox Luther Bible edition appeared in 1743 in an edition of 1200 copies and was the first Bible in a European language to be printed in America.
Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg warned his congregation not to buy Sauer's Bibles, but to wait for real Cansteinsch Bibles to be imported.
Sauer's Bible mission to Germany
1745 Christopher Sower sent 12 of his Bibles as copies of Frankfurt / Main back to where he the fracture - letters had taken for his print shop. The recipient was Heinrich Ehrenfried Luther, the owner of Egenolff 's printing and typesetting. The merchant ship "Queen of Hungary" was captured by pirates off the French coastal town of St. Malo ; But Luther was able to secure the Bibles in 1747 in a detour, one of which is now in the possession of the Frankfurt University Library , one in the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar and one in the Darmstadt University and State Library .
In 2016, the Frankfurt Historical Museum was able to purchase Luther's own copy of the Sauer Bible, in which he recorded the events of the Atlantic crossing, from private collections, along with other printed matter and letters from Sauer. The new exhibits are now part of the permanent exhibition about Frankfurt as a printing and publishing city.
The second and third edition
Sauer's son, Christoph Sauer II, printed the second edition in 1763 and the third in 1776. The latter appeared in the year of the revolution with an edition of 3,000 copies, most of which, however, never came into circulation. Sauer had published calls from the Quaker community to keep the peace and was therefore targeted by the insurgents himself: "The revolutionary troops confiscated the majority of the printed sheets and used the paper to plug the gunpowder into their gun barrels."
literature
Thomas Parschik: The word of the Lord in the new world: on the trail of a rare edition with an interesting provenance history. In: Buch und Bibliothek , 2019, issue 5, page 257
Individual evidence
- ^ Hans Leaman, Yale University: Johann Christoph Sauer (1695-1758). In: Immigrant Entrepeneurship. German-American Business Biographies. Retrieved November 22, 2017 .
- ↑ Signature of the Darmstadt copy: Gue 30
- ↑ Kulturstiftung der Länder: Old writings from the New World. Retrieved December 14, 2017 .
- ↑ Gernot Gottwals: Historical Museum shows printed products from America. Frankfurter Neue Presse, January 20, 2017, accessed on December 14, 2017 .
- ^ SUB Göttingen: Holy Scriptures, Bibles and religious texts from 1000 years. Retrieved December 14, 2017 .