Bible Leaves in Philadelphia, London, and Paris

I have recently become more interested in large Bibles. (Small ones may of course be very interesting, too, but they can be very fiddly to handle, often involve a lot of page-turning and eye-strain for very little reward, and if they are not in an institutional collection they are often unfoliated (or incorrectly foliated), which makes them difficult to describe and collate).

Erik von Scherling (1907–56) and Rotulus

Rotulus, vol.IV, no.1871 [Source]

Erik Edzard Floris Folkard von Scherling was the younger son of the Swedish Consul at Rotterdam, where he was born on 20 May 1907. When he left school he went to work for the bookseller Jacob Ginsberg in Leiden, where he specialised in Oriental books, and learnt Latin and Arabic.

Another Soranzo MS, now in Philadelphia

Browsing images of manuscripts at the Free Library, Philadelphia, I recently came across another unrecognised manuscript (Lewis E 219) formerly owned by Giacomo (alias Jacopo) Soranzo, with the distinctive foliation described in a previous post:

More Initials from the Bible of Pedro of Pamplona

A year ago I wrote a blog post about cuttings from the Bible of Pedro of Pamplona, all but one of which I believed to be in institutional collections. In correspondence with Geneviève Marièthoz, who is actively working on the Bible, I subsequently learned that six more initials are in a private collection in France.

By pure luck I recently found reproductions of four more previously-unrecognised initials on two consecutive days. The first was in the collection of Adolf von Brekerath of Berlin, sold by Lepke in Berlin, 17–21 November 1916, lot 12: