BOOK OF LINDISFARNE Evangeliorum Quattuor. Codex Lindisfarnensis.

SUPERB SET - LIMITED TO 680 COPIES FROM THE LIBRARY OF MURRAY GELL-MANN
Two volumes. Olten & Lausanne: 1956-1959. Imperial folio. Bound in full and half vellum parchment with red and black lettering. Edition limited to 680 numbered copies [No. 460]. From the library of Murray Gell-Mann with his bookplate on front pastedown. A very good set. Very scarce.

The inhabitants of the border country of England and Scotland were converted to Christianity by Irish
missionaries, who taught them to read and write, what a book was, and how it might be embellished.
St. Aidan, an Irishman, was sent from Iona in 635 A.D. and founded the monastery of Lindisfarne, just
off the Northumbrian coast and connected to the mainland by sands at low water. Sixty years after its
founding the wonderful Gospel-book was created. The Book of Lindisfarne is a manuscript written on
white calf-skin and illuminated by Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne from 698 to 721 A.D. in accordance
with the Celtic traditions bequeathed by the Irish founders of the community, who withdrew from
Lindisfarne, after the Synod of Whitby, to Mayo of the Saxons. The codex contains the text of the four

Gospels, each preceded by prefaces and a list of feasts on which a lesson from that Gospel should be
read. It is in the Vulgate text, with an Old English paraphrase, written in Irish character. The book as a
whole is elaborately illuminated, following the decorative formula of the Book of Durrow, but in a
more developed and profuse style. Miraculously the Gospel book has come down to us. Owing to
continuous Danish raids, the Lindisfarne community, tired of wandering about, decided to go to Ireland
and settle there. They embarked with their precious relics at the mouth of the River Derwent, but were
turned back by a great storm, in the course of which the Gospels were washed overboard. Whether by
divine intervention or not they were found next day undamaged on the estuarine sands, three miles
from the shore. The present facsimile contains twenty-eight plates in full colour and four hundred and
ninety in monochrome.
Provenance: From the library of Murray Gell-Mann with his bookplate. Murray Gell-Mann (1929-
2019) American theoretical physicist, was born in Lower Manhattan to a family of Jewish immigrants
from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, specifically from Czernowitz in present-day Ukraine. He played a
preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles and received the 1969 Nobel
Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
Novelist Cormac McCarthy saw Gell-Mann as a polymath who “knew more things about more things
than anyone I‟ve ever met...losing Murray is like losing the Encyclopædia Britannica.”