Last week we discussed how Gemini had spotted that our 1700 "Mortier's Large Bible" actually existed in two states ("before the nails" and "after the nails") and flagged that ours was the rare and far more important "before the nails" state. That this work had two different states of its last engraving had never come up in any of our conversations with various curators or experts, but Gemini flagged that one of the seminal Dutch-language reference works noted this information and discovered several academic discussions of it and confirmed that ours was the former, providing comparison imagery. An even more interesting case comes from our 1866 First Edition Mame Dore Bible. Like the Mortier, our Dore is a first printing, first edition. In all of our conversations to date about the Dore or the art scholars who have looked at our copy, no-one mentioned to us that there were actually TWO states of the first printing of the first edition. Yet we just happened to have picked that plate as one of the dozen or so cellphone images we snapped and handed to Gemini to use in its condition review of our work. It immediately flagged that this was the rare "robe" edition of the Formation of Eve plate (see example of second state and more details), one of just 3,200 copies ever printed of this first edition first state and even flagged that the red binding was the original publisher's red percaline binding with gilt lettering. We can't wait to see what Gemini discovers as these works are fully digitized later this year!
