HAVERHILL — In the 1400s, as Europe was waking from the Dark Ages, the way people were getting information was changing.
A man named Johann Gutenberg invented a method for printing books from wooden and later metal moveable type. He set out on his first significant publishing endeavor — reproducing the Bible in the mid-1400s.
Only a few of the 180 Gutenberg Bibles have survived the centuries — and a page of one of those cherished relics is tucked away in a safe in the Haverhill Public Library.
"When you think of it, it is awesome," said Mary Johnson-Lally, the interim library director.
The library trustees have been discussing recently what to do with the famed Bible page, which is in Latin and contains chapters from the book of Jeremiah.
Johnson-Lally said displaying the page has been discussed, but the costs would be high. The artifact would have to be stored in a special case to protect it from light and air, she said.
Meanwhile, the city can appreciate what it has.
Few editions of the Bible survived. According to the University of Texas at Austin, which owns a full copy of the book, there are only five full editions in the United States.
Haverhill's former library director, Donald Campbell, bought the Gutenberg Bible page in 1923 for $150 from a well-known New York book dealer named Gabriel Wells.
Wells bought a complete copy of the Bible and decided to sell the book page by page. The pages came to be known as Noble Fragments, one of which is in Haverhill.
Johnson-Lally does not know how much Haverhill's page is worth. Noble Fragments from the Old Testament sell for $79,000 at Greatsite.com, a Web-based rare book dealer. Another page sold for nearly $26,000 at PBA Galleries of California.
Haverhill's page was printed between 1450 and 1455 and the print is in the Gothic style, Johnson-Lally said.
She said the page was occasionally withdrawn from a safe by Greg Laing, the former head of the library's special collections department, to be shown to schoolchildren. Laing died Feb. 3 of cancer.
Library officials will have to decide what to do with the page now and whether it can be displayed.
"The best thing for it, unfortunately, is that it is kept in the dark because that is the best way to preserve it," Johnson-Lally said. "But there is that fine balance of making it available for people to see."
Thomas Spitalere, a local historian, said preserving old items can be expensive. Thousands of dollars were spent to buy a special case to preserve a Civil War flag at Buttonwoods Museum in Haverhill, he said.
"Preservation is not cheap," Spitalere said.
The Gutenberg Bible
Published in the mid-15th century by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany.
First significant book published on a printing press with movable type.
About 180 copies were made, 145 of those on paper and the rest on more expensive vellum.
Published in Latin with Gothic typeface.
Before Gutenberg, most books were copied with a pen by monks in a writing room known as a scriptorium.
The Old Testament portion of a Gutenberg Bible was sold for $5.4 million in 1987 at Christie's auction house in New York.
