Gutenberg Bible

• 1. Introduction

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  The Gutenberg Bible, also known as the 42-line Bible, the Mazarin Bible or the B42, first surfaces in the record through a letter written in March 1455. In Frankfurt, pages from the new edition were on display to promote it. A man who would later become Pope Pius II saw them and wrote about what he had seen. That letter is still the most reliable evidence for when the book appeared. It also cites sources for two different print runs, 158 copies and 180 copies. The book was an edition of the Latin Vulgate, printed in the 1450s by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, in what is now Germany. It was the earliest major book printed in Europe with mass-produced metal movable type. How did Gutenberg make a page that still looks so fine? What changed while the presses were running? Who could afford a copy, and where do the survivors sit today?

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• 2. Ink and Press

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  Kristian Jensen, head of collections at the British Library, points out how shiny a Gutenberg page looks when you study it up close. He explains why with a memorable line: "One of Gutenberg's inventions was an ink which wasn't ink, it's a varnish." Scribes of the day used water-based ink. Dip a pen in it and it clings to the nib, but it runs straight off a piece of metal type. Gutenberg developed an oil-based ink that would stick. It was mostly carbon, with a high metallic content in which copper, lead and titanium predominated.

  The pressing method was just as deliberate. Each sheet of paper was dampened first, which helped it take up the ink. The dampened sheet was then pressed onto an inked surface made of movable type. After every sheet the type was inked again, and the cycle repeated until the whole run was done. Afterward the type was cleaned and sorted back into type cases for later jobs. This approach is a form of relief printing.

  In a legal paper written after the Bible was finished, Gutenberg described the whole enterprise as Das Werk der Bücher, "the work of the books."

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• 3. Type and Page

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  A set of 290 master characters was needed to print the Gutenberg Bible. Every letter existed in uppercase and lowercase, and the set also covered punctuation marks and ligatures, such as the single piece standing for the letters f and i together. It seems probable that six pages, holding 15,600 characters in all, were set at any one moment.

  The letterforms belong to the blackletter family, in the styles known as Textualis, or Textura, and Schwabacher. Textura takes its name from the woven look of the page, where straight vertical strokes meet horizontal lines. Gutenberg also justified his columns, so that both the left and right edges sit in a clean vertical line. He did it by mixing narrower characters, adding extra space around punctuation, and varying the gaps between words.

  The paper was the size called Royal, where a full sheet measures 42 by 60 cm and an untrimmed folio leaf measures 42 by 30 cm. The leaves of the copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, measure 40 by 28.6 cm. Some writers have claimed the proportions echo the Golden Ratio. The two ratios differ by about 12 per cent, and the 1 to 1.4 shape was a long established medieval paper standard.

  A complete copy has 1,288 pages, which means 322 sheets of paper, since each sheet carries four pages. Five folded sheets, making ten leaves, were usually gathered into a section called a quinternion. Watermarks suggest the linen-fibre paper came from Caselle in Piedmont, Italy.

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• 4. Changes Mid-Run

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  Pages 1 to 9 and 256 to 265 of the Bible have 40 lines each, and these were presumably the first pages printed. Page 10 has 41 lines. From there on every page carries 42, which is where the name 42-line Bible comes from. The extra lines were squeezed in by tightening the space between lines, not by enlarging the printed area, and the aim was presumably to save paper.

  Then the print run itself was enlarged. That forced the printers to reset pages already done, and all the new sheets were set at 42 lines. As a result there are two distinct settings in folios 1-32 and 129-158 of volume I, and in folios 1-16 and 162 of volume II. Scholars today read the surviving copies as pointing to somewhere between 160 and 185 copies printed, about three-quarters on paper and the rest on vellum.

  Preparation of the Bible probably began soon after 1450. Gutenberg's 31-line Indulgence, the first precisely datable piece of his printing, certainly existed by the 22nd of October 1454. The first finished Bibles followed in 1454 or 1455. The expense of equipment and materials suggests he may have begun with more lucrative work, including religious documents, a German poem, and editions of Aelius Donatus's Latin grammar, the Ars Grammatica.

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• 5. Finished by Hand

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  A printed guide for rubricators, the artists who added red headings, still survives. Initially the headings before each book of the Bible were printed, but at some unknown date this was abandoned. Gaps were left instead for hand-lettering. The generous margins also invited painted decoration, and how much a copy received presumably depended on what its buyer would pay. Some copies were never decorated at all.

  The place of decoration can be known or inferred for about 30 surviving copies. It is possible that 13 were decorated in Mainz, while others were worked on as far away as London. Vellum copies cost more and tend to be more lavish, yet the vellum copy in the British Library has no decoration whatsoever. The copy at Princeton University library was once linked to the "Master of the Playing Cards", an unidentified engraver. All that can be said for certain is that one model book supplied illustrations for both this Bible and some of his playing cards.

  Nine copies keep fifteenth-century bindings, most made in Mainz or Erfurt. Most were split into two volumes, with the first ending at the Book of Psalms. Heavier vellum copies were sometimes bound in three or four volumes. The copy at Eton College carries a stamped calfskin binding signed by Johannes Vogel, and it belonged to the Carthusians at Erfurt.

  One Paris copy bears the earliest date found on any Gutenberg Bible. Its first volume is inscribed the 24th of August 1456 and its second the 15th of August 1456, marking the days the rubricator and binder Henricus Cremer finished.

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• 6. Readers and Influence

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  At least some copies sold for 30 florins, which equalled about 100 g of gold or roughly three years' wages for a clerk. The Bible appears to have sold out at once, with early buyers as far away as England and possibly Sweden and Hungary. That price was well below a manuscript Bible, yet most students and priests could not have paid it. Most copies are assumed to have gone to monasteries, universities and very wealthy individuals. Only one copy is known to have been privately owned in the fifteenth century.

  Some Bibles were used for communal readings in monastery refectories, others were perhaps for display, and a few were certainly used for study. Kristian Jensen suggests that wealthy, pious laymen often bought copies in order to donate them to religious institutions.

  The text itself is the Vulgate, St Jerome's Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament. It includes emendations from the Parisian Bible tradition, plus other divergences. Later printers copied it. It served as the model for the 36-line Bible, Mentelin's Latin Bible, and the first and third Eggestein Bibles. The third Eggestein edition was set from the copy now in Cambridge University Library. The Clementine edition of the Vulgate, commissioned by the Papacy in the late sixteenth century, was influenced too.

  The 36-line Bible, said to be the second printed Bible, is sometimes called a Gutenberg Bible as well, but it may be another printer's work.

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• 7. Scattered Leaves

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  Around 1760, Guillaume-François Debure found a copy in the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. He described it in his Bibliographie instructive, published in Paris in 1763, and that library gave the Mazarin Bible its name. Since then, collectors and dealers have broken some copies apart. In 1921 the New York rare book dealer Gabriel Wells bought a damaged copy, dismantled it, and sold the leaves in a portfolio with an essay by A. Edward Newton. They became known as the "Noble Fragments".

  In 1953 Charles Scribner's Sons, also New York dealers, dismembered a damaged paper copy of volume II. Its New Testament is now at Indiana University. A leaf carrying part of Ezekiel 14, all of chapter 15, and part of chapter 16 was donated to repair the copy at the General Theological Seminary. The dealer Joseph Martini had found that the seminary's existing leaf was a forgery, and no one could tell when it had been inserted. The replacement, in the fall of 1953, made it "the first imperfect Gutenberg Bible ever restored to completeness."

  As of 2009-49 Gutenberg Bibles are known, and only 25 are complete. Fragments probably represent about another 16 copies, and many survived because binders reused them in later books. A fragment known as the Bagford Fragment is in the British Library, while others sit in Dublin, Basel, Melbourne, Wellington and several American collections.

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• 8. Prices and Provenance

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  In 1911 Henry Huntington paid US$50,000 for the copy now in San Marino, California. The Library of Congress bought its vellum copy in 1930, as the centrepiece of the Otto Vollbehr collection. A much older purchase shows how prices began: Thomas Grenville paid 6260 francs for the British Library copy in 1817, and the Bodleian Library paid £100 in 1793 for another. Meanwhile the John Rylands Library copy was bought for £80 by Earl Spencer before 1814. The first copy to cross into North America arrived in 1847, and it now belongs to the New York Public Library.

  Prices then climbed. In 1978 the General Theological Seminary copy sold for US$2.2 million to the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart. That year a complete copy was bought for US$2.4 million, and it now sits in Austin, Texas. No complete copy has sold since. A complete Gutenberg Bible is now estimated at $25-35 million. In October 1987 the first volume of the former Doheny copy sold for a total of $5.4 million, including commission, and Keio University in Tokyo bought it in 1996.

  Keio's HUMI project, directed by Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya, has made digital reproductions of 11 sets of the Bible in nine institutions. Not every copy has stayed safe. The Moscow State University copy was looted from Leipzig University in 1945, and a different two-volume paper edition was stolen from Moscow State University in 2009. It was recovered in an FSB sting operation in 2013. Libraries that hold one speak of owning a "trophy book".

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