Older books can offer fascinating history lessons as you dig into their layers (literally) like an archaeological dig. Once upon a time it was common to bind or rebind books by gluing together stacks of pages from older books to make a thick sheet to act as the cover boards over which the vellum was wrapped. This "binding waste" was typically taken from older books and can yield fascinating stories. At right is the inside cover of a 1583 Aldine edition of Cicero's works. A fracture in the vellum adhesion was slowly and gently worked back to reveal a sliver of the text underneath near the top of the inside cover. Using Gemini 3.0 as a seed and some additional manual research, this binding waste page was at long last tracked down to its original source: the 1487 incunable printing of the Biblia Latina by Georgius Arrivabene in Venice ("Explicit biblia Venetiis impressa per Georgium de riuabenis mantuanum al's parente"). There are at least 40 pages of the 1487 Arrivabene Bible glued together across the front and back covers of this Cicero. This particular page is from The Book of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), end of Chapter 15 / start of Chapter 16 – notice how the page at right matches exactly the righthand column of the digitized copy of the Arrivabene at left. Interestingly, we had long been unable to trace this provenance using previous LMMs due to the commonality of the visible phrases, but Gemini 3.0 was able to recognize that this specific set of phrases in this specific order and column structure were unique to this specific Bible.
It remains a fascinating mystery how an Aldine Cicero from nearly five hundred years ago came to be bound in an Arrivabene Bible from a century prior. Through Gemini 3.0 we were able to at least discover this improbable connection.
