A love story with a difference, recounted byPatrice Chaplin

The Kennicott Bible, possiblythe most beautiful Hebrewmanuscript in existence, hasbeen stored in the BodleianLibrary, Oxford, since 1872,on show only to privilegedscholars and historians. Now,thanks to the untiring efforts ofa London couple, Michael andLinda Falter, this masterpiecewill surface in the form of 500expertly produced facsimilecopies and so be available tothe public for the first time.

The Bible was com-missioned in the fifteenthcentury by Isaac, the son ofDon Solomon di Braga, a pro-minent Jew of La Coruna inNorth-West Spain. The muchacclaimed scribe Moses ibnZabara was chosen to producethe exquisite script. Heworked in an unusually har-monious fashion with his illus-

trator, Joseph ibn Hayyam,and the result of their collab-oration is, to quote the Encyc-lopaedia Judaica, 'The finestsurviving example of SpanishJewish Art . . . the culminationof the art of the Hebrew Bible.'

Joseph ibn Hayyam'sunique illuminations in rich,luxuriant colours made fabu-lous with superbly appliedgold and silver have a Moor-ish, sometimes Gothic influ-ence. Above all, they expressthe artist's joyful originality,his love of fancy and splen-dour.

Produced at the very timeSpain's Jews were facing TheInquisition, the Bible is a last,undying reminder of a onceglorious but lost heritage.From the beginning it wasdesigned as a lavish work--238 of the 922 pages are illu-

minated, an unheard-of quan-tity.

It acquired its current namefrom Benjamin Kennicott, theEnglish Christian Hebraistwho presented it to the Rad-cliffe Library in 1771. It wastransferred to the BodleianLibrary in 1872 and today isconsidered one of Oxford'sgreatest treasures.

As if by destiny, the Faltersmet each other and The Kenni-cott Bible more or less simul-taneously. The following fouryears were spent devoted tothe Bible's reproduction—years not without defeat andtimes of hopelessness.

One Sunday afternoon inAugust 1980, Michael Falterhad nothing to do. 'I was abachelor so I thought why notvisit the British Museum. Afterall you never know who you

might meet there.' He didn'tquite meet Linda but he founda display of beautifully illumi-nated Hebrew manuscriptsand decided then that hewould reproduce somethingexquisite.

An entrepreneurial printer'sengineer, Michael's trainingwas in business managementthough he had been born intothe printing industry — bothhis father and grandfather hadbeen printers. He'd spent twoyears at the London College ofPrinting, then set up his ownbusiness. 'I'd buy up second-hand printing machines, com-pletely take them apart, re-build them and sell them witha guarantee as new. Over theyears I'd acquired threeantique printing presses —the original hand-operatedones from 1851 — and I

wanted to put these to someuse.'

Having come to that deci-sion at the British Museum,Michael went to see David Pat-terson, the director of theOxford Centre for Post Gradu-ate Hebrew Studies, who saidthere was one manuscriptabove all worthy of repro-duction and that was the Ken-nicott Bible.

'He arranged for me to visitRon May, the senior assistantlibrarian of Oriental Manu-scripts at the Bodleian Library,the following week. I wentback to London feeling I wason the right track. I was. I metLinda.'

Linda was born in Nott-ingham and at sixteen trav-elled to Mexico, France andSwitzerland. At 19 she went towork for the UN as a deskofficer in Geneva. After thatshe worked in Teheran for theRepresentative of Iran andAfghanistan at the ILO. Thenshe taught English and Frenchin an Iranian school. Followingthat she ran a restaurant in LosAngeles, 'The House of Iran.'Her next move was to be TelAviv where she wanted to liveif her brother hadn't neededhelp with his health club inKensington.

An undeniably beautiful girl

with radiant health and viv-acity, Linda was surprisinglyalone and lonely in London. 'Iwas working in my brother'shealth club from 9 am until9 pm and I didn't know a soulhere. Eventually a friend ofmy brother's introduced meto Michael. It was just at thetime he was going to the Bod-leian Library so I went withhim and for the first time wesaw the Kennicott Bible. Iremember the day as sobright and lovely. You see, I'dbeen shut in the basementhealth club and hardly sawdaylight.'

They fell in love, marriedand now have a young son,Gideon. That was the easypart. Bringing the KennicottBible out into the world fromthe library basement has beenan exacting business, whichobviously needed their com-bined skills.

How did they feel seeing theKennicott Bible for the firsttime? Their procedure withthe manuscript seemed verymuch like that of adopting ababy.

'On the first visit we weren'tallowed to touch it,' saidMichael. 'Ron May carried itup to his room and it reallywas awe-inspiring. It's hislove as well, of course.'

In 1980, London businessman Michael Falter happened to see someHebrew manuscripts in the British Museum. Shortly afterwards he metLinda, now his wife. Two events which triggered off a remarkably ambi-tious four-year endeavour to reproduce the Kennicott Bible, a work ofexquisite craftmanship, examples of which are shown on these pages

The Bodleian's Ron May and Bible flanked by Michael and Linda Falter

The Bodleian is not a publiclibrary and permission toenter is not easily obtained.The goodwill of Ron May andthe support of David Pattersonfacilitated their next visits. Butthey had to convince thepublications officer and theBoard of Oxford University togive them a contract to pro-duce the facsimile.

At what point did theydecide to take it on?

Linda and Michael looked ateach other and realised it hadnever been a decision. It wassomething they just had to doand they went right ahead anddid it.

'What struck me when I sawit the second time was thismanuscript is five hundredyears old and I'm sitting by it,as close as the original artisthad been,' said Michael. 'Itwas an emotional experienceto have so close to you thisfabulous piece of history. So Iwanted to bring to light some-thing that would not normallybe seen.'

'No, we definitely didn'tdecide to do it,' emphasisedLinda. 'It decided for us. It wassomething beautiful that tookyou away from the nastiness ofeveryday, a lovely thing to beinvolved in. But the challengeof reproducing it without theskills that were availablewhen it was originally exe-cuted was formidable.'

Michael pointed out that tofind a manuscript of that age insuch good condition wasunusual. The secret was in thebinding. It is one of only fourknown works — all Jewish —bound on all six sides so whenclosed it's completely sealedand no air can get in.

A week after visiting theBodleian the Falters set offacross Europe to find aprinter. In fact it took two anda half years to solve the print-ing problem. That wasnothing compared with get-ting the gold right. Then therewas the paper problem. Andthe box binding.

At the same time, theOxford Committee would notgrant them the contract. Theyfelt it was too enormous anundertaking — the Falters hadproduced no other facsimile,apart from son Gideon! Theirgoing ahead would excludeanyone else trying. Also TheOxford University Press itselfwas considering reproducingit.

'They were extremely dis-couraging,' said Michael. 'Infact they discouraged us somuch it took two years to get acontract out of them. Whathelped was that OUP decidedthe facsimile was beyond itscapabilities. By then the com-mittee were impressed with

our knowledge and will tosucceed.'

In Michael Falter's opinion,facsimile producers almostalways take the easy way out.They print on beautifully sur-faced paper which will pickup every tiny detail and looksgreat but happens to beopaque.

'This avoids the problem ofthe "showthrough." Manu-scripts are transparent, trans-lucent not opaque. So wewanted a vellum indis-tinguishable from the original.But sometimes the air canmake a book destroy itself andwe've taken good care thatthis one won't. After getting

nowhere on the European tripwe wrote to dozens of papermills and eventually found asort of greaseproof paper thatwas formerly used for wrap-ping bread. It turned out to beunstable. It had no grain to it.As soon as the atmospherechanged the paper changed.But the mill was interested sothey eventually produced apaper to specification. It took ayear, cost a fortune.

'We're printing this fac-simile with nine colours. Butyou can't just put a piece ofpaper in one end of themachine and it comes out withnine colours at the other. Itgoes in one colour at a time.

The sheet then has to dry, thenit goes through again. Andeach time there's an oppor-tunity for an atmosphericchange so the paper coulddistort and the next colourwould be totally out of regis-ter. You could get it on theninth colour and it wouldmean all that work has beenwasted.

'We'd seen hundreds ofprinters and it was beginningto look hopeless. Then onejust turned up in London withhis family from Italy. He saidhe had proofs of the paper,the transparency, the proofsof the binding even. At first Ithought it was a friend havinga joke. But Luigi was real. Hecame from Milan from a familyof printers and the quality ofhis work was astounding. Thecolour was fantastic. The goldwasn't great but it had pro-mise. We took him and hisfamily to the Bodleian andopened the manuscript andhis face dropped. He said,"It's impossible. There's somuch gold. We don't have anymachinery to reproduce thatsort of thing." So we droveback to London and not aword was spoken. He wasvery upset.'

And then the box binding,put out to top binderies inEngland, just could not bematched.

'We got to a point,' saidLinda, 'where we nearly gaveup. On each one of theelements, the gold, the paper,the printing, the binding, wewere near defeat.'

They financed the venturethemselves and for two yearson speculation because theystill hadn't been granted acontract from Oxford. Theyhad to finance the tests for theEnglish binderies. This tookmonths and the costs wereexorbitant. The results weredisappointing.

'Part of the problem wasthat nobody knew how theyconstructed the box in the firstplace.'

Once again the well-starredItalian printer found the sol-ution. He simply went to anearby binder in Milan whoproduced a marvellous bind-ing just from a photograph.

'No problems, no hassles,'said Michael. 'I wanted to dothe binding here in England. Ifyou can't get a good one here,I thought, where on earth areyou going to get it? We've gota fantastic tradition, after all.The Italian produced a Moroc-can goatskin over woodenboards. There are geometricdesigns on the six sides,embossed with handcut brassdies. The original binding isdamaged and even has a fewholes. Well, we won't produce

those, they're so ugly. We'renot going to take a pickaxe tothe binding to make it lookold. It will look like it did whenproduced originally. But theinside will look as it doestoday. The pages will have allthe stains that life has giventhem. But of course the work isin particularly immaculatecondition.'

The problem of the goldwas resolved quite by coinci-dence. One of Michael's con-tacts, a woman 'well-known inthe manuscript field' in Milan,discussed the selling pro-gramme for the Bible.Depressed, Michael admittedhis failure with the gold. Bychance her husband hadmade special gold foil thatwas used in the printing ofmanuscripts.

'It hadn't been used muchlately because no-one's pro-ducing manuscripts any more.Well, it was terrific but had tobe put on by hand. So now wehave to hand gild each illus-tration — in other words, tenthousand pages by hand.'

The photography of theKennicott Bible is now underway. The Bodleian stipulatedthat only their photographerbe used and the manuscript isnot allowed to leave the build-ing.

'The best way to photo-graph it is to disbind it so wecan have the sheets flat butthey won't allow disbindingeven though it had been dis-bound a hundred years ago,'said Michael. 'So we had tofind a way to photographinside the box. Luckilythe Bodleian photographer,Charles Braybrooke, is verygood. To avoid damaging theoriginal he has to photographthrough glass, but ordinaryglass would cause discolour-ing. So we had optically whiteglass manufactured to capturethe true colours. It was pheno-menally expensive.'

Did the Falters expect tomake a profit? Five hundredBibles at 4,700 dollars each?Early subscribers get them forless. They said they'd behappy to break even.

'We want to go on doingthis,' explained Linda. 'Notjust Hebrew manuscriptseither. It's part of our lifenow.'

Professor Bezalel Narkiss,an authority on Hebrew illumi-nated manuscripts, has writ-ten a commentary that willaccompany the facsimile Biblein a separate volume.

'It's such a high-qualitymanuscript that we had to get

the best person to write it,'said Linda. The commentarytells the story of the KennicottBible, how it was created, itshistory, the importance of theilluminations. In the Falters'view, it's a wonderful piece ofeducational material in its ownright.

Production of the Bibles willbegin in December and thelast one will be finished inMay. The Falters will stay inMilan to supervise the print-ing. Every sheet will bebrought to Oxford to be com-pared against the original.

The Bodleian and theOxford Committee aredelighted the Falters havebeen successful. And DrMartin Brett, a medieval his-torian at Cambridge Univer-sity, enthusiastically endorsesthe idea of the facsimile. 'Itwill protect the actual manu-script. Some of these pricelessworks simply fall apart in yourhands. You feel their bindingscrack and it's a very uneasyfeeling. Now scholars won'thave to keep referring to theactual manuscript but to thefacsimile instead. Four thou-sand dollars or so is notexpensive at today's publish-ing costs, especially as somuch care has gone into thisreproduction. The general

public should be able to viewa masterpiece but the troubleis people are destroying,while adoring. Expertly pro-duced facsimiles solve thatproblem.'

Looking back, how did theFalters feel about the last fouryears?

Michael said, 'I'm sureLinda and I were destined tobe together. And I had to dothe Bible. I spent twelve yearsin the printing industry andanother five trying to get outof it. But if you've got printingink in your blood it staysthere.'

Linda said, 'I think we weremeant to be together and to dosomething together. I think mylife up to meeting Michael wasa preparation for that. Abeautiful Hebrew Bible is avery strong thing to do. Afterall it will go on long afterwe've kicked the bucket.'

As for Gideon, at threemonths he'd already been toall the printing works in Italy.'He wouldn't sleep during thenight but he slept through allthe din of the printingmachines,' said Linda. 'Theharsh smell of the chemicalsdidn't worry him either.' Hecan truly be said to be borninto the printing trade, fourthgeneration.

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