Gutenberg Bible

The Gutenberg Bible was designed to be mistaken for a manuscript. The type was cut to imitate the formal textura book hand used for liturgical books in the Rhineland, and to do it convincingly Gutenberg needed not one shape for each letter but many: alternative forms, ligatures where letters join, and abbreviated forms, so that a printed line would show the same variety a scribe's hand produces naturally. The result runs to some 290 distinct characters for an alphabet of about two dozen letters.

The sheets left Mainz plain. Initials and rubrics were added by hand afterwards, by decorators the buyer employed locally, which is why no two surviving copies look alike and why some are far more elaborately painted than others. A printed book in 1455 was a half-finished object that its owner completed.

It is a Latin Vulgate in two volumes, set mostly at forty-two lines to the column, which is where the alternative name comes from. Around 180 copies were made, on paper and on vellum. Forty-eight substantially complete copies survive, and their individual histories have been tracked so closely that the movements of particular copies over five centuries are a scholarly literature in themselves.

Gutenberg did not sign the book. His name appears nowhere in it, there is no colophon and no printer's device, and the attribution rests on documents outside the object.

The most important is a lawsuit. The Helmasperger notarial instrument, drawn up in November 1455, records the suit brought by Johann Fust, who had lent Gutenberg the money for the workshop, over repayment of those loans. The settlement left Fust and Gutenberg's foreman Peter Schoeffer in possession of the equipment, and Fust and Schoeffer went on printing under their own names. The invention's first great commercial success therefore belonged, almost immediately, to someone other than the inventor.

The other document is a letter. In March 1455 Enea Silvio Piccolomini, a papal diplomat who later became Pope Pius II, wrote to a cardinal describing quires of a Bible he had been shown at Frankfurt. He said the lettering was so clean that a man could read it without spectacles, that he had not been able to obtain a copy because the entire edition was already spoken for, and that between 158 and 180 copies were being made. It is the earliest external notice of European printing, and it records the technology arriving already sold out.

The two documents together are why the book has a maker at all.