Somewhere in the year 1454 or 1455, in a rented workshop in the city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johann Gutenberg pulled the bar of a wooden screw press and lifted away a sheet of paper carrying two columns of dense black letter, forty-two lines to a column. It was the first sheet of a Bible. Not the first book of any kind to bear a printer’s name, and not the first thing ever printed with movable type, but the first large book made this way, and by a very long way the most consequential. Five and a half centuries later something like forty-nine copies of it are known to survive, complete or partial, scattered through libraries in Vienna, Paris, London, New York, Mainz and a dozen other cities. They are the most examined, most litigated and most expensive books in the history of the printed word.
What follows is an attempt to look at the Gutenberg Bible as what it plainly is: a book. A physical object with measurable dimensions, a weight, a price, a manufacturing history and a long chain of owners. The usual way of telling this story is to tell it as a story about genius, about a lone craftsman in a dark workshop struggling against the monopoly of the scribes. That version is true as far as it goes, but it stops well short of the more interesting claim, which is that what Gutenberg and his partners actually built was a system for making books cheaply and reliably, and that the system immediately became more interesting than any one book could be.
The Bible was chosen for a reason, and the reason is not mysterious. It was the longest book anyone wanted, it was in demand everywhere, it was a book whose buyers could be found and whose money could be counted, and it was a book that could be produced at a price low enough to make a printing press pay. The story of how that was done, and of what happened afterwards to the text and to the object, is one of the great transitions in the history of the book, and it turns on a series of decisions about paper, type, ink and money that can still be read off the surviving copies.
The Book Before Printing
Before printing, a Latin Bible was an industrial product, but an industrial product of the medieval kind: a thing made by hand, one at a time, at a cost set by the labour it consumed. By the middle of the fifteenth century the standard form of the Latin Bible was well established, and it is worth describing that form precisely, because the printed Bible of 1455 reproduces almost every feature of it.
The text was Jerome’s Vulgate, the Latin translation that had been the common property of western Christendom for eight hundred years. But the Vulgate as it circulated in the fifteenth century was not one text but a family of them, and the dominant family was the so-called Paris Bible, standardised at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. A Paris Bible is a large folio in two volumes, the Old Testament and the New Testament, with the text set in two columns of roughly forty-five to fifty lines to the page, and it is remarkably uniform. The uniformity is the point. The thirteenth-century Paris scriptoria found that they could produce a Bible whose every page looked the same, whose lettering was regular enough to be read easily at a lectern, whose initials were painted in the same red and blue, whose chapter divisions and summaries were the same from copy to copy, and whose cost could be quoted in advance. A library buying a Bible in Paris in the 1300s knew what it would be getting. That reproducibility, achieved by human skill and division of labour, was the thing printing was later going to beat.
The making of such a manuscript was itself a small industry. The parchment was prepared by fleshers and skinners and prepared again by parchmenters, who dehaired, limed, stretched and stretched again the skins of calves and sheep. The leaves were ruled by a maker of bifolia with a lead point and a ruling board, so that every line of every page fell into place. The text was copied by scribes working in a scriptorium, often in teams, sometimes with two or three writing at once on the same open folio and then checking each other’s work at the end of the quire. The head of each book was supplied with an illuminated initial, sometimes with a full page of miniature painting, and the running heads, the chapter numbers, the summaries and the references were all put in by a second trade, the rubricator, in red ink. A good Bible was the product of at least three or four separate workshops, and the buyer was buying a collaboration.
The numbers are worth holding in mind, because they set the scale of the problem Gutenberg set himself. A large Bible manuscript contains on the order of 1,300 pages of dense text, roughly 2,600 characters to a page. A competent scribe working at a fair speed might manage fifteen to twenty pages a day, and that is a figure that assumes good light, good parchment and an unbroken stretch of attention. Estimates for the time a scribe needed to produce a Bible therefore run from many months to several years, and the price of a finished manuscript Bible is generally put somewhere between sixty and a hundred florins. That was not a sum that put a Bible in a village. It put a Bible in a cathedral library, a university library, a princely library or the private library of a prosperous merchant or lawyer, and it took a year or more of a scribe’s working life to produce one.
Demand, meanwhile, was climbing fast. The universities of northern Europe had multiplied since the 1300s, cathedral chapters had begun to commission systematic sets of biblical volumes rather than complete Bibles, the mendicant orders wanted Bibles they could put in a portable chest and take from house to house, and the ordinary layman, whose reading and whose money had both grown, wanted a book that told him what the Church said and what the Church forbade. The most quoted estimate for the thirteenth century is that several hundred Paris Bibles survive, which implies that the original number was several times that. Germany, the Low Countries, Italy and England all had their own local scripts, and their local variants.
Into this situation Mainz was a well placed but not exceptional city. It was the seat of an archbishop, the capital of a rich ecclesiastical principality, a river port on a very busy river, and a place of fairs and of good crafts in metalwork. Its particular advantage for a printer was that it was a place where a man could fail quietly. We do not know what Gutenberg was doing between 1448 and 1454, and the silence is itself suspicious: it suggests experiments, probably with type, probably with ink, probably expensive. Some of the earliest datable products of the Mainz press are not the Bible at all but papal indulgences from 1454 and 1455, printed so that they could be sold to the crowds that came to the cathedral on its feast days. The Bible was the serious work. The indulgences were the cash flow.
And here is the commercial problem in its sharpest form. A manuscript Bible had to be sold one at a time, to one buyer at a time, at the price the labour justified. A press could sell one hundred and eighty Bibles in a run, all but identical, at a price that undercut the scribe. But a press that printed a hundred and eighty Bibles had to be certain, before it printed them, that there were a hundred and eighty buyers. That certainty is what a fair could supply, and in the winter of 1455 it was at the Frankfurt fair that Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the imperial secretary who would become Pope Pius II, saw what was happening. He wrote to a cardinal in Rome that he had come across a man with a great number of Bibles for sale, and that he had been shown quires, gatherings of ten leaves, from several copies of a Bible whose letters were larger and more legible than any he had seen. Others told him that something like 158 copies, or as many as 180, were being printed, and that they were selling quickly.
Everything about the 42-line Bible follows from that moment. It was not printed because anyone had decided that the printing of the Bible was a good idea. It was printed because a workshop in Mainz had solved enough of the problems of type, ink, paper and press to be able to offer a Bible at a price, and because there was a fair full of buyers who needed one.
The Workshop in Mainz
The first thing to say about Gutenberg is that he was not a printer who had been a goldsmith, but a goldsmith who became a printer, and that the training shows in the finished book. Gutenberg of Mainz appears in the city’s records from the 1420s, a member of a family with money in it and connections to the Mainz mint. He was trained to work in metal, to cut punches, to strike and to assay, and the central problem he set himself was the one a metalworker would think of first: how do you make a letter that can be produced by the thousand and still look as though a human being wrote it?
Manuscript letters are not uniform. A scribe’s a is never quite the same twice; his ascenders lean differently on different lines; his letters vary in width according to the word. To set type that would pass as writing, Gutenberg could not simply cast one a and use it for every a. He solved the problem the way a goldsmith would: by cutting a matrix for each distinct letter form, with all the variations that the script required, so that a single sort of type could carry the whole burden of the manuscript tradition. The type used in the 42-line Bible is usually given as some 290 sorts in all, made up of 47 capitals, 63 lower-case letters, 92 abbreviations and contractions, 83 ligatures and 5 punctuation marks. The figures come from the trade literature rather than from a workshop ledger, and they should be treated as approximate, but the principle is not in doubt.
The abbreviations are the most important part of the list, and they are the part most often missed. A fifteenth-century scribe did not write every letter in full. A stroke stood for a missing n or m; a superscript mark stood for a whole ending, sometimes for an entire word. A print of 290 sorts would have been useless for this, because each contraction would have required its own sort, and the alphabet would have become unmanageable. By designing the type with its contractions built in, and by giving the compositor the same shorthand the scribe used, Gutenberg made one sort do the work of several. The letter shapes themselves imitate the formal Gothic book hand of the Rhineland, with its broken strokes and its angular feet, and the effect on a reader in 1455 was of an impeccably scribal book that had somehow produced itself.
The matrices were cut in metal, traditionally attributed to a goldsmith named Hans Dunne, working with two sons of a Mainz mint master, Goetz von Schlettstadt and Hans von Speyer. The punches were struck in a hand press, and from each punch a small piece of copper was struck, the matrix; into that matrix a blank of soft alloy was cast, the sort; and each sort was filed and polished to the correct height and width so that it would sit in the frame and take ink evenly. It is estimated that some 16,000 individual pieces of type were needed for the whole Bible. An apprentice working at a bench could produce perhaps 200 sorts in a good day. The type alone was a serious capital investment, which is one reason Fust’s money mattered.
The press itself was borrowed from a different trade. Gutenberg adapted the screw mechanism of the wine press, or possibly of a press for olive oil or for parchment, to the job of printing: a flat platen driven down by a wooden screw onto a sheet of paper laid on a flat bed, with the type held in a forme of an iron frame clamped tight enough that it would not shift under the pressure. Above the forme sat a tympan, a hinged frame stretched with parchment, into which the sheet was laid and damped so that it would take the impression cleanly; above that a frisket, a second hinged frame with paper cut away over the printing area, which masked the sheet so that the margins came out white. The pressman laid down a thin film of ink with leather and wool dabbers, lowered the tympan and the frisket, took a small bite on the bar and pulled it towards him, and the screw drove the platen down and the page was printed. It was slow, deliberate work, and the skill lay in an evenness of pressure and in judging how much ink the paper would take.
The ink was the problem that took longest to solve and the one most often discussed. Early experiments in Europe had used the sort of oily ink the illuminators used, and it behaved badly on paper, spreading and blotting. The Mainz solution was an ink made from soot, or lampblack, ground into a varnish of some kind, thin enough to be brushed on with dabbers rather than applied by a roller, because rollers came later and worked better with oil-based inks. The result was a dense, matte, slightly grey black that sits on the surface of the rag paper rather than sinking into it, and it is the reason that the type of the 42-line Bible still looks crisp after five hundred and fifty years.
The paper deserves as much attention as the type, because in the 1450s it was the scarcer commodity. European paper was made from linen rags, and after the demographic shock of the fourteenth century the supply of rags was tight and their price high. Watermark evidence has allowed four separate paper deliveries to be identified in the sheets used for the 42-line Bible, and the whole run of roughly a hundred and eighty copies is estimated to have consumed something in the order of 50,000 sheets. Each sheet was folded so that it printed four pages at a time, two on each side, and the printed folio was then cut and folded again into the shape the reader would expect. Around 150 copies were printed on paper and perhaps thirty on vellum, with other reckonings giving a different split. The vellum copies were the expensive ones, and were bought by institutions; the paper copies were the ones that circulated. A complete paper copy of the two volumes, with its original boards and stitching, is generally estimated to weigh in the region of seven to eight kilograms, which is a useful reminder that this was already a two-fisted object, designed to be read on a lectern and not carried in a pocket.
After printing, the sheets had to be gathered. The compositor printed in sequence, working from a manuscript exemplar, and the leaves were assembled into quires of ten leaves, each quire signed with a signature mark so that the printer and the binder could check the order at the end. The sheets were then folded, the quires sewn onto thongs, and the sewing covered with a skin to form a text block; the boards, the leather and the clasps were the work of a binder, not a printer. The 42-line Bible was sold as two volumes, the Old Testament from Genesis to the Psalms in the first and Proverbs to the Apocalypse in the second, in the great folio format of about 42.5 by 33 centimetres. The number of leaves is usually given as 643, with roughly 1,280 pages.
The production went through three distinct phases, and reading the surviving copies in the light of them is one of the pleasures of working with the object. In the earliest sheets, the red rubrics that introduce each book of the Bible were printed along with the black text, which meant passing every sheet through the press twice. The procedure was soon abandoned, presumably because it was too slow, and the rubrics were left to be supplied by hand. Gutenberg made the transition easier by printing four leaves of instructions for the rubricator, specifying the exact wording and the exact red ink; two sets of these instructions survive, one in Munich and one in Vienna. Then the number of lines to the page was increased: the first quires printed have 40 lines to the column, folio I:5v has 41, and from folio I:6 onwards there are 42. The gain was made by tightening the leading, not by enlarging the page, so the printed area stayed the same and the type stayed the same. Finally, the run was enlarged, which meant that sheets already printed had to be reset to make up numbers. That is why the Bible exists in two settings, and why a handful of folios exist in a first setting and a second setting, with the reset pages always having the full 42 lines. The clearest conspectus of the two states remains Seymour de Ricci’s catalogue of the early Mainz printing, with Paul Schwenke’s independent work alongside it.
Four compositorial units can be detected in the text, each beginning at the start of a book: at Jerome’s letter to Paulinus in the first folio of the first volume, at the First Book of Kings, at Proverbs and at the First Book of Maccabees. That is the workshop as it actually functioned, several men setting type simultaneously from the same exemplar at different points in the text, and it is one of the reasons that the smallest differences between copies are not errors but evidence of sequence. The first sheet of the Bible, the very first sheet pulled, is also the one that carries a famous error. Two lines were set wrongly in it. When the mistake was found, the sheet was re-imposed and printed afresh, and the two faulty lines were replaced on the new sheet by a block of newly set type that carried the text of the prologue further down the page. That reconstruction of the correction, and in particular the number of lines in the replacement block, rests on one detailed study of the sheet rather than on a consensus, and readers should treat the details as one scholar’s reconstruction. What is not in doubt is the consequence. The faulty sheet was the first one pulled, so the copies that preserve the error stand at the head of the sequence: they are the earliest impressions of the Bible, and the copies with the corrected sheet are, in the most literal sense, later.
And then the buyers took the book over. The printed pages left Mainz with their capitals undecorated and their rubrics unwritten, and the buyer commissioned a rubricator and an illuminator, or bought the book plain. The rubricator’s work differs from copy to copy, which tells us at once that this finishing was done outside the printing house. Heinrich Cremer, vicar of the church of St Stephen at Mainz, rubricated, illuminated and bound the paper copy now in Paris, and his work is identified by name. The binder Johann Fogel’s stamps are found on three of the surviving copies, which is as close as a book historian gets to a signature. A few copies were finished in Bruges in a style associated with the illuminator Willem Vrelant; one vellum copy was worked on in London. The result is a strange and wonderful thing: a book that is mechanically identical in its text and yet, in its decoration, entirely unique. Each copy is a collaboration between a machine and a human hand, and the hand usually wins.
One of the surviving copies carries at the head of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the second volume a small diagram of the Trinity drawn by hand in ink. The descriptive literature on the copies gives it the nickname of the helmet, from the shape of its outline, and it has been claimed that it is the only such diagram to occur in any printed Bible. That claim comes down to a single authority and has not been independently surveyed, so it is best repeated as a report rather than as a finding. Either way the object is worth pausing on. Within a few years of the first sheets coming off the press, readers were drawing in the printed Bible as they had always drawn in the manuscript, and the printed book, for all its mechanical uniformity, had already begun to accumulate the marks of individual hands.
Loans, Lawsuits and the Secret
The story of who paid for the 42-line Bible is tangled, and the tangle is the single best reason to distrust the heroic version of the Gutenberg story. The one document that survives from the litigation, drawn up in Mainz on 6 November 1455 by the notary Ulrich Helmasperger, is the reason we know so much and also the reason we cannot be certain of very much else.
What it establishes is this. In the summer of 1449 Johann Fust, a wealthy Mainz financier and printer of indulgences, advanced Gutenberg 800 guilders for the manufacture of printing equipment, and took the equipment itself as security on the loan. The workshop was set up in the Humbrecht courtyard, which belonged to a relative of Gutenberg’s living in Frankfurt. In 1452 and again in 1453, Fust put up a further 800 guilders, this time for what the document calls the work of books. The principal advanced was therefore 1,600 guilders in two instalments of 800. The sums are sometimes reported in older literature in a very different form, and the number 8,000 appears in accounts that have never been tied to a document; the Helmasperger instrument, which is a document, is quite explicit about the two payments of 800 and about the total of 1,600.
Fust wanted his money back. Gutenberg argued that the second advance was not a loan but a partnership in the work of books, and that he, Gutenberg, was entitled to his share of the finished Bibles. The court in the archbishop’s secular court did not accept that defence. The Helmasperger instrument is in large part an inventory: it lists the press with its fittings, the type, the tools, the ink and the leather, item by item, so that the court could know what it was dividing. Fust’s claim was for 2,026 guilders, the principal of 1,600 with interest. Gutenberg lost the workshop and, on the most common reading of the judgment, roughly half of the Bibles that had been printed. There is no reason to suppose he was ruined. He still owned property in Mainz, he is on record repaying other loans, and he continued to print after the judgment. But the single workshop with the good type and the trained men in it was Fust’s from that day, and Fust took it to his calligrapher Peter Schoeffer, who had come to him from a spell as a scribe in Paris and who was, by every account, a superb compositor.
The lawsuit is usually told as the moment the printing secret leaked, and it is true that a secret exposed in court is a secret half given away. But the dispersal of the technique was already under way for other reasons. Craftsmen move. Printers poach printers. Papal indulgences, which were printed in Mainz in 1454 and 1455 and which carried no printer’s name at all, were widely and immediately copied elsewhere in Europe, and the shape of the sheets travelled with them. Within a few years there were presses in Bamberg, in Strasbourg, in Cologne, in Venice and in Paris, and by 1500 the standard census of incunable printing records something in the order of thirty thousand editions from a few hundred towns. The Mainz exclusivity was over by the time the 42-line Bible was a decade old.
Fust and Schoeffer set up their own firm and made the printing secret pay. The Mainz Psalter of 14 August 1457 is the first book with a definite date printed in it, and the first book to carry printed musical notation, with the staff lines themselves printed rather than ruled by hand. Its rubrics are printed in red, and its 288 two-colour initials and its great B were cast in metal rather than painted, which was a technical advance of real significance: a metal initial could be printed a hundred times, and the Psalter was sold in an edition large enough to need it. Their Bible of 1462 was the first Bible to carry a date, and it was set from the 42-line Bible, using a copy of it as the working exemplar. The Morgan Library in New York owns a copy of the 42-line Bible which carries the earliest surviving compositor’s marks, evidence that it was used as a model when Fust and Schoeffer set their own 1462 Bible, which is a neat and slightly humbling detail: the first Bible of the new trade was copied from the first Bible of the old one.
Fust died in 1466. Schoeffer married his partner’s daughter, inherited the business, and printed more than two hundred titles under his own name, including the 1468 book of the Institutiones that carried the first printed poem about printing, which names two Johanns of Mainz who had mastered the art of cutting letters. One of them was Fust. The other was Gutenberg. Gutenberg died on 3 February 1468, the feast of St Blasius, and the entry was made in a book printed after his death, because Gutenberg himself, to the end, had never put his name on his work. The 42-line Bible, the book that made him, has no title page, no colophon, no printer’s name and no date. Everything we know about who made it, when and where, we know from lawsuits, from the letters of travellers, from the books other printers produced afterwards, and from comparing the physical object against itself, copy against copy, over five centuries of scholarship.
The Text and the Tradition
What did Gutenberg print? The Latin Vulgate, of course, but the interesting question is which Vulgate, and the answer is still not fully settled.
The National Library of France, which holds two copies, states the position plainly: the text is the Vulgate as it had been established at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. The Bavarian State Library puts it the same way, describing the copy-text as a manuscript of the Paris standard. But the Library of Congress, which has read its own copy more closely than almost anyone, is careful: the exact manuscript used as the exemplar has never been identified, and what can be said is that the source was a textual variant of a Vulgate Bible common to the Rhine region. The practical difference matters less than it sounds. The thirteenth-century Paris standard was a school text, a single normalised reading of the Latin Bible made by university scholars who were deliberately regularising what they found, and it had already been disseminated across Europe by the book trade. Gutenberg was working from a book that belonged to that tradition but was not identical to any known member of it. He was copying, in other words, from a copy, and the copy was a local variant of the standard that circulated widely. The printed Bible inherits the local reading and then exports it.
That is the first great consequence, and it is worth stating plainly because it recurs throughout the history of printing. The French national catalogue observes that throughout the fifteenth century the commentless editions of the Vulgate follow, for their text, that of the 42-line Bible, directly or indirectly, wholly or at least very closely, with rare exceptions such as the edition printed at Piacenza in 1475. Gutenberg did not merely reproduce a text. He fixed one. A Rhine variant, chosen by accident from one manuscript, became the printed standard for Europe, and for the next three centuries the great majority of Latin Bibles in circulation were descendants of that choice.
The other consequence is structural, and it is the one that makes the object so valuable to study. When the run was enlarged and sheets already printed had to be reset, the reset pages were set from the same exemplar, but they were set at a different moment, by a different compositor, and they came out with the full 42 lines instead of the earlier 40 or 41. The result is that the two settings are not simply an earlier and a later state of the same page. They are two independent acts of composition that happen to carry the same text. Where a copy differs from another at a reset folio, the difference is evidence about the order in which the sheets were printed, not about a different text. This is the forensic technique that lets bibliographers put individual copies into sequence, and it is why a copy of the 42-line Bible that has spent five centuries in a library can still tell us something about the order of a workshop’s work in 1455.
Meanwhile the manuscript tradition did not disappear. It narrowed. The Paris Bible continued to be copied into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it is a commonplace in the study of the Vulgate that the printed text and the manuscript text ran for a long time in parallel, each with its own authority, each feeding the other. The Roman Clementine Vulgate of 1592, which remained the official Latin text of the Catholic Church for four centuries, was made with reference to the manuscript tradition rather than to the printed books, which is a reminder that the printing of the Bible did not abolish the authority of the scribe; it added a second authority and left the two to negotiate.
Nor did the printed Bible put an end to the habit of printing from a printed book. The Cambridge University Library’s copy of the 42-line Bible was acquired soon after publication by another printer and used as the exemplar from which that printer set a later edition of the Bible, according to the library’s own account of it. The B36, the 36-line Bible, was printed at Bamberg by Albrecht Pfister, not after 1461, with a recasting of Gutenberg’s older type, and was set from a copy of the 42-line Bible; it is generally regarded as the third edition of the Bible. A copy of the 36-line Bible at Princeton is the only one in America, and it carries a vellum fragment that was bought as a single sheet in 1934 and turned out, sixty years later, to belong to a copy of which eighty-eight fragments had been used, in the 1680s, to bind up documents in German archives. The manuscript and the printed book had by then been thoroughly mixed together in the dust of old libraries.
What the printed text allowed was comparison, and comparison at a scale no scribe could have managed. Within a decade the Bible was being printed in German at Strasbourg by Johannes Mentelin in 1466, and there were fourteen German editions before 1518, all of them translated from the Vulgate and all of them full of errors by the standards of their own time. Martin Luther’s September Testament of 1522 and the complete German Bible of 1534 were different in kind: the New Testament was worked from the Greek of Erasmus, the Old Testament from the Hebrew with the help of the Second Bomberg printing and of scholars such as Aurogallus and Melanchthon. But even Luther worked in an ecosystem that the 42-line Bible had made, and there is a direct line from the Vulgate he criticised to the Vulgate on his desk. The Stuttgarter Vulgate, a printed Latin Bible of 1519 annotated in manuscript by someone else entirely, was probably the copy that Luther actually handled at the Wartburg, though the identification has been argued over since it was rediscovered in 1995.
The polyglots pushed the same logic further. The Complutensian Polyglot, printed at Alcala de Henares between 1514 and 1517 in six folio volumes under the patronage of Cardinal Ximenes, set the Latin Vulgate beside the original Hebrew and Greek in parallel columns, with the New Testament in the original languages and the Old Testament in a revised Hebrew type. The Antwerp Polyglot of Christopher Plantin, printed between 1568 and 1573 in eight volumes, was the most extravagant of the great printed Bibles, and its cost was such that only a handful of complete sets were ever bound. The King James Version of 1611 descends from the same printed tradition through Tyndale, Coverdale and the Bishops’ Bible, resting on a Greek base and on a Latin tradition that the 42-line Bible had done more to shape than anyone could have intended when the first sheet came off the press.
So the printed text did two things at once. It froze a text that had been fluid, and it made that frozen text travel. The manuscript Bible had always been a variation on a theme, and every library in Europe held its own reading. After 1455 there was a text that was the same in Paris and in London and in Wittenberg, and the distance between a good copy and a poor one ceased to be measured in readings and began to be measured in decoration. For two hundred years the European Bible existed in two forms, the handwritten and the printed, and the history of the object is the history of that strange double life.
Afterlives: The Bible as a Commodity
Presses spread quickly and printed Bibles faster still. Within a generation a Latin Bible could be had in Paris, Cologne, Nuremberg, Basel, Lyon, Venice or Rome, and a vernacular one in German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish and eventually English. The Bible was the commodity that proved the trade. The reason is not simply that it was the longest book; it is that it was the book everyone needed, that it sold in predictable numbers, and that a printed Bible could be offered at a price that changed the arithmetic of reading for people who had never imagined themselves in the market for a Bible.
The price is the clearest single measure of what the press did. Thirty florins is the figure usually given for a paper copy of the 42-line Bible, roughly three years’ wages for a skilled clerk, and it is the figure that gets quoted because it sounds so neat. The underlying estimates are less tidy: a French survey of the same question puts the paper copies at between twenty and thirty-four florins and a vellum copy at about fifty, with a manuscript Bible running from sixty to a hundred, and notes one vellum copy with a contemporary inscription recording a price of a hundred florins. A scribe who needed a year to produce one Bible could now be set against a press that produced a hundred and eighty, and the buyer who could not pay sixty florins for a manuscript could now, in principle, pay thirty for something that was the same text in the same format. The gap between the two prices was the whole point, and it was much smaller than the difference in labour suggests, because the press could not yet sell a cheap book cheaply: the paper, the type, the ink and the wear on the press all had to be paid for.
And the buyers behaved as buyers do. The Bibles seem to have sold on subscription, in advance, at the fairs, with copies going as far as England, Sweden and Hungary. The manuscript market and the printing trade were never separate economies. A library that had wanted a manuscript Bible now found a printed one on the same shelf, cheaper and more uniform, and it wanted it. By the 1470s a printed Bible had become the ordinary way for a European institution to own one, and the manuscript Bible became what the trade called a deluxe, a thing bought for the look of it.
That last phrase is the paradox at the heart of the 42-line Bible. Its makers sold uniformity, and its buyers paid for individuality. Because the decoration was left to be done after printing, every copy became a collaboration between a workshop and a local artisan, and no two copies look the same. The Paris copy was rubricated and illuminated in Mainz by Heinrich Cremer. The Munich copy was finished in 1461. One vellum copy carries the marks of work done in Brugges, another in London, and the London vellum copy in the British Library was left entirely undecorated, which makes it the odd one out and one of the most informative objects in the whole group. The distinction between the printed text and the manuscript book dissolved into a single hybrid artefact: identical words, unique surfaces.
What survived is remarkable in itself. Counting conventions differ, because some counts treat a two-volume set as one copy and some treat a single volume as a copy, and because fragments are counted differently from complete books, but the figures cluster around forty-eight or forty-nine survivors, of which about twenty-one are complete. The Library of Congress says forty-eight, of which twelve are on vellum; the Mainz museum counts forty-nine; other libraries give slightly different tallies again, counting a two-volume set and a single volume differently. The disagreements are small and are really disagreements about what to count. Behind them lies a rather grim statistic of survival: for a book that was made in scores and printed in scores, most copies were read to pieces and then used for something else.
The survivors ended up in remarkable places. The Library of Congress copy passed through the princely Benedictine abbey of Sankt Blasien in the Black Forest, whose engraved bookplate still shows inside the front board, and then moved with the French armies through Einsiedeln and Spital am Pyhrn to the monastery of Sankt Paul in Lavanttal in Austria. It was in the abbey at Sankt Blasien that Martin Gerbert, the prince-abbot, compared it in 1765 with a 36-line Bible at Memmingen and published an engraving of the opening of Genesis, an early contribution to the identification of the printed Bible. In 1926 the book dealer and collector Otto Vollbehr agreed to buy the three-volume set from the monks at Lavanttal. Three years later Congress bought Vollbehr’s collection of some three thousand incunables together with the Bible, and the Bible itself did not arrive in Washington until 3 September 1930. It is on display in the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building, on view to anyone who walks in.
The Mainz museum holds two of the forty-nine, one of them the Shuckburgh copy, acquired for the museum in 1978 at a price that was then without precedent for a printed book. The Harry Ransom Center in Austin holds a complete paper copy in early bindings, which came out of the New York collection of Carl H. Pforzheimer and was bought at auction in 1978 for $2.4 million, a figure that was regarded as absurd and that now looks cheap. In October 1987 Christie’s in New York sold a single volume of the 42-line Bible to the Japanese bookseller Maruzen for $4.9 million, $5.4 million with the commission; the Keio University Library acquired it in 1996 and now has the first volume without the second. Leaves and single pages from the Bible continue to appear at auction. In October 2023 a leaf from the series known as the noble fragments sold at Sotheby’s for $119,700, the fragmentary survivors of a damaged copy that had been broken up by a dealer in the twentieth century and then scattered further by dealers who understood the market for an individual leaf.
That is the frame in which the whole history sits. In May 2023, at Sotheby’s in New York, the Codex Sassoon, a Hebrew Bible manuscript of around the year 900, was sold for $38.1 million, the most money ever paid for a book. That is the correct shape of the story to end on, because the two objects are the same argument made in two materials. The Codex Sassoon is a manuscript, and it is the single most expensive book in the world; the Gutenberg Bible is a printed edition, and its record price is more than a hundred times lower. The scribal tradition was what the printing press was for, and the prices at which the two traditions now trade measure what the press achieved, and how long it took.
What Gutenberg actually built was not a machine for printing books. It was a machine for printing one particular book, repeatedly and identically, at a price that made a new class of reader possible, using a type designed to imitate the conventions of the scribe so thoroughly that the finished object could pass in the market as a luxury manuscript. Its press did not abolish the manuscript. It made a second copy-text, and then it made that copy-text into the standard, and then it sold the standard in every language the trade could reach. Everything that followed, from the German vernacular Bibles of the 1460s to Luther, to the polyglots, to the Authorised Version, is downstream of that: a text made immovable so that it could travel, printed on a scale that turned a book into a commodity, and then given back, leaf by leaf and page by page, to the hands of the people who bought it.
References
- The Gutenberg Bible at the Library of Congress: A Resource Guide – Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, 2022, updated 5 December 2025
- The Library’s Copy of the Gutenberg Bible – Marianna Stell, Library of Congress, 2022, updated 5 December 2025
- Related Resources: The Gutenberg Bible at the Library of Congress – Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, 2025
- Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible – Eric Marshall White, Harvey Miller and Brepols, 2017; bibliographic record and review, Revista de Estudios Bibliograficos
- The Gutenberg Bible, 550 Years after Gutenberg – Eric Marshall White, Bible and Interpretation, University of Arizona, 2018
- Gutenberg Bibles’ Paths Offer New Insights – Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, Princeton University Alumni Weekly, 20 September 2018
- The Gutenberg Bibles – Gutenberg Museum, City of Mainz
- Gutenberg-Bible – Bavarikon, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich
- Bible de Gutenberg [Texte imprime]: Biblia latina – Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, catalogue record
- Gutenberg Bible: the Three Phases in the Printing Process – British Library, Treasures in Full, archived 2020
- Early Print: Gutenberg Bible, John Rylands Library copy – University of Manchester Library, digital collections
- Biblia latina [Bamberg: Albrecht Pfister, not after 1461], the 36-line Bible – Princeton University Library, Digital Princeton
- The 42-line Bible – Keio University Libraries, Digital Collections
- Treasures of the Library: the Gutenberg Bible – University of Cambridge Library
- First Impressions: The Gutenberg Bible – Emily Dourish, Cambridge University Library Special Collections Blog, 12 November 2016
- Books, Manuscripts & Music: the Codex Sassoon, sold New York, 17 May 2023 – Sotheby’s