Noble Fragments

A unique rare-books story, and a remarkable family history.

After World War II, Michael Vistontay's widowed grandfather married a Hungarian Jewish woman, also widowed during the war. This woman, Olga, was the niece of a famous New York rare bookseller, a Hungarian-born Jew named Gabriel Wells, who had immigrated to the US as a young man, leaving his big family behind.

In 1920, Wells had acquired a very rare Gutenberg Bible, which had 53 of its 643 leaves missing, and came up with the idea of selling the leaves individually. He got a prominent collector to write an essay, and packaged each sale up as 'A Noble Fragment'.

He made a fortune, and it cemented his reputation. When Wells died in 1946, he received an extensive obituary in the New York Times. He died without a wife or children, and his considerable estate went to many of his nephews and nieces because most of his siblings had been murdered during the Holocaust.

The money that Olga inherited underwrote Michael Visontay's family's new life in Australia. His grandfather and father were able to buy a delicatessen business in Kings Cross (they had owned one in provincial Hungary before the war), and eventually Visontay's brother and he inherited the shop, and are actively involved in the building.