The Printed Page Was Still Finished by Hand

A workshop in Mainz cast metal type, set it, and printed a Latin Bible on vellum around 1454–55. The sheets came off the press deliberately unfinished.

Gaps were left in the type for red headings and paragraph marks, and blank squares were left for large initials. Other people, working afterwards and by hand, filled them in: vermilion, blue, a little dry penwork, and small marks at the foot of the leaf telling a binder which sheet followed which. Then the sheets were folded into quires and sewn. On the Library of Congress copy, the white pigskin bindings you can see on the shelf came about a hundred years after the printing.

An early large-format typographic Bible — the first major book printed with movable metal type in Western Europe. That is the careful claim, and it is the claim worth making. Printing existed before Mainz, and books existed long before printing; what happened here was the first big book made this way, on this continent, at this scale.

Title

Biblia Latina

Made

Mainz, about 1454–1455

Support

Vellum

Extent

Three volumes, complete — 1,282 pages

Setting

Mostly 42 lines, in two columns

Hand work

Red and blue added after printing

Binding

White pigskin, 16th century

Kept by

Benedictines for nearly five centuries; the Library of Congress since 1930

Record

Library of Congress item 52002339

Two names come down to us with the workshop, as the Library’s current guide gives them: Johann Gutenberg, and Johann Fust, whose money underwrote the work. Everyone else who touched this object is anonymous — and there were many of them.

The people who made the parchment. The founders who cut and cast the sorts. The compositors who set 42 lines to a column, and the crew who pulled the sheets. The rubricator who came after the press with vermilion. The decorator who put blue and red into the empty squares, and the hand that ran restrained penwork out into the margin. The binders, generations later. The Benedictine owners and readers. Otto Vollbehr, who sold the collection. Representative Ross A. Collins and the Congress that voted the purchase. The librarians and conservators who turn the leaves now.

Provenance on this copy is physical. It sits on the object in layers, one over another: Benedictine ownership at the abbey of St. Blasius and later at St. Paul, spanning nearly five centuries of use; the collector’s trace from Otto Vollbehr, who held it within his collection of incunabula; and the accession of 1930, when an act of Congress appropriated the funds and the Bible entered the Library of Congress, where it has stayed.

Read as marks, they tell you who handled a thing. Read as a timeline, they flatten into dates and lose the hands.

• The leaf you worked on is a diagram, not an image or a facsimile of the object. Its letterforms, marks and layout stand for kinds of labour; they are not a reading of any actual page.
• The white pigskin bindings are 16th-century work and are not the product of Gutenberg’s workshop.
• The red and blue on this copy is restrained rubrication and penwork. Some other copies of the Gutenberg Bible carry lavish illumination; this one should not be described from those.
• Library of Congress texts differ on how many complete vellum copies survive — the older online exhibition and the current research guide do not agree — so no number is stated here. Take the figure from the current guide, with its date attached.
• No rubricator, decorator, compositor, pressman or binder of this copy is named, because none is known. None has been invented.
• General production practice for the Gutenberg Bible and observations specific to the Library’s copy are two different things. The copy-specific facts above are the ones drawn from the object record.

• Primary — object recordBiblia Latina, Library of Congress item 52002339
• Primary — current guideGutenberg Bible research guide, Library of Congress
• Exhibition (older)The Gutenberg Bible — Bibles exhibition
• Exhibition interactiveThe text
• Exhibition interactiveThe page
• Exhibition interactiveProvenance