This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Printed Books gathers three early printed editions that the atlas catalogues as manuscripts' successors and rivals rather than as manuscripts themselves, the physical witness rather than the text being the atlas's organizing principle throughout this type.
The Gutenberg Bible, produced at Mainz around 1454 and 1455, is the first substantial European book printed from movable metal type, a Latin Vulgate set in type cut to imitate the region's formal book hand so closely that the printed page was meant to pass as written. Around 180 copies were made, on paper and on vellum, of which forty eight survive substantially complete; the Bible sits in this grouping precisely because it is not a manuscript, which is what makes it significant.
Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum Omne, printed at Basel in 1516, is the first published Greek New Testament, its Greek text set beside Erasmus's own fresh Latin translation. Working from no more than seven or eight late Greek manuscripts, none older than the tenth century, and rushed to beat a rival edition to market, its first printing was full of errors later editions spent years correcting, yet it went on to shape the Greek text behind Luther's German New Testament and Tyndale's English one.
The Complutensian Polyglot Bible, financed by Cardinal Cisneros and printed at Alcala de Henares between 1514 and 1517, set the Old Testament in parallel Hebrew, Latin and Greek columns with the Aramaic Targum alongside the Pentateuch, and included the first printed Greek New Testament and complete Septuagint, though papal approval delayed the finished six-volume Bible until it reached readers in 1522, six years after Erasmus's rival Greek New Testament had already been in print and circulation.