Gutenberg Bible

The Gutenberg Bible is an edition of the Latin Bible printed in the German city of Mainz in the mid-1450s. It is the earliest major book printed in Europe with movable metal type, a technique that allowed the same letters to be arranged, printed, taken apart and reused. It was produced in the workshop of Johannes Gutenberg with money lent by the Mainz merchant Johann Fust.

Because most of its columns have 42 lines, bibliographers call it the 42-line Bible, or B42 for short. It is also called the Mazarin Bible after the copy in the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, the library founded by Cardinal Mazarin, which the bookseller-bibliographer Guillaume-François Debure described in 1763. His description was one of several eighteenth-century studies that made the edition famous.

Printing was not invented in Mainz: woodblock printing had been used in China, Korea and Japan for many centuries, and movable type had been made in China from the eleventh century and in metal in Korea by the thirteenth century. What Gutenberg created was a complete system for producing metal type in large quantities and printing with it efficiently, and this system spread rapidly across Europe.

Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was born in Mainz around 1400; the exact year is unknown, but a document of 1420 shows that he was then of age. He came from a patrician family and took his usual name from the family house, the Hof zum Gutenberg. His father was associated with the Mainz mint, and documents from his later years in Strasbourg suggest that Gutenberg worked as a skilled goldsmith.

Because of political conflicts in Mainz, he lived for many years in Strasbourg, where he is documented from 1434 to 1444. In 1439 the brothers of his partner Andreas Dritzehn, who had died in December 1438, took him to court. The records show that the partners had planned to make mirrors for pilgrims to Aachen, and they mention a press, lead and “forms”. Some historians read these vague references as early experiments with printing; others point out that they may refer only to making the mirrors.

By 1448 he was back in Mainz, where in October of that year he borrowed 150 guilders from Arnold Gelthus. Around 1450 the Mainz businessman Johann Fust lent him 800 guilders, and a few years later another 800 for what the documents call “the work of the books”. In 1455 Fust went to court to recover his money, and the Bible workshop passed to him. Later documents, however, show that Gutenberg kept property in Mainz and was not left penniless.

The key invention was a way to cast many identical letters quickly. No contemporary description of Gutenberg’s casting method survives, so it is reconstructed from later practice and from the printed letters themselves. In the traditional reconstruction, a craftsman carved a letter in reverse on the end of a hard steel rod, called a punch, and struck it into a block of softer copper to make a mould of the letter, called a matrix. The matrix was fitted into an adjustable hand mould, and molten metal was poured in; in a few seconds a small metal letter, or sort, was ready. Type metal was later an alloy of lead, tin and antimony, but the exact composition of Gutenberg’s alloy is not known.

Compositors picked the sorts from type cases and arranged them in lines to form a page. The page of type was locked in a frame, inked with an oil-based ink that stuck to metal better than the water-based inks used by scribes, and pressed onto dampened paper or vellum using a screw press, probably adapted from presses used for wine, paper or linen.

To make the pages look like fine handwriting, Gutenberg’s workshop cast about 290 different characters: capitals, small letters, many ligatures (joined letters) and abbreviations, and letters of slightly different widths. This allowed the lines to be perfectly justified, with straight left and right edges, as in the best manuscripts.

The work was huge. According to the Gutenberg Museum and the Bavarian State Library, about 20 people worked on the Bible, and scholars think it took two to three years. The first pages were set with 40 lines per column, then 41, then 42, probably to save paper. A few early sheets were printed with red headings in a second pass, but this was soon abandoned and red was added by hand instead.

The size of the edition is not recorded. Piccolomini heard in 1455 that 158 copies, or according to others 180, had been made; modern estimates range from about 150 to 180. The Göttingen library and the Bavarian State Library give about 180, some 140 on paper and some 40 on vellum (calfskin), which was much more expensive; the Gutenberg Museum estimates about 150 on paper and 30 on vellum. Most of the paper came from Italy, and each vellum copy required the skins of many calves.

The printed sheets were sold unbound. Buyers then paid local craftsmen to finish them. A rubricator added red and blue initials, chapter headings and page headings; an illuminator could add gold, painted initials and decorated borders; and a binder bound the volumes. As a result, no two copies look alike. Some are richly painted, while the Library of Congress copy, for example, has simpler penwork initials.

A copy now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France contains notes by Heinrich Cremer, who rubricated and bound it, dated August 1456 (15 August in one volume and 24 August in the other). These notes show that printing was complete by then. Because the decoration of surviving copies was done in many different places, historians conclude that copies were sold well beyond Mainz.

Several conditions came together in the Rhineland in the mid-fifteenth century. Paper, once an import from the Islamic world, was now produced in Italy and increasingly north of the Alps, so it was far cheaper than parchment. German towns had skilled goldsmiths, coin-makers and metal-casters who knew how to work precise punches and moulds. Wine and paper presses were familiar machines. And there was a growing market of readers: universities, schools, monasteries, clergy and prosperous townspeople.

The Church also had reasons to want reliable, uniform texts. Reform movements of the period complained that hand-copied liturgical books and Bibles contained many errors and variations. The papal legate Nicholas of Cusa, who travelled through Germany in 1451–52 promoting church reform, called for correct and uniform service books. Some historians suggest that such demands encouraged Gutenberg to choose a Bible as his great project, although there is no direct evidence linking Cusa to the workshop.

Finally, printing was a business. Gutenberg needed large loans to buy metal, paper and vellum and to pay workers long before any copies could be sold. A large Latin Bible offered access to an established market of churches and religious houses, although the printers’ own commercial reasoning is not documented, and the Vulgate itself circulated in differing textual forms. Small items such as indulgence forms, calendars and school grammars (the Latin grammar of Donatus was printed several times in early Mainz) were also produced in early Mainz printing, but how much they contributed to financing the Bible is uncertain.

The Bible has no printed date or colophon, so its date must be worked out from other evidence. The most important is a letter of 12 March 1455 from Enea Silvio Piccolomini, then secretary to Emperor Frederick III and later Pope Pius II, to Cardinal Juan de Carvajal in Rome. Piccolomini reported that in Frankfurt, probably during the imperial diet held there in October 1454, a “marvellous man” had shown quires (gatherings of leaves) from several books of the Bible, so clean and correct that they could be read without glasses. He had not seen a complete Bible, and he added that buyers had reportedly been found for all the copies even before they were finished. The letter does not name Gutenberg.

A second key document is the Helmasperger Notarial Instrument of 6 November 1455, drawn up by the notary Ulrich Helmasperger during Fust’s lawsuit against Gutenberg. It records Fust’s sworn statement that he had advanced Gutenberg 1,550 guilders, money he had himself borrowed at six per cent interest, and that he wanted back, with interest, whatever had not been spent on their common “work of the books”. The ruling on this point went against Gutenberg, but the document says nothing about the final settlement. Afterwards Fust ran the workshop with Peter Schöffer, a calligrapher who had studied at Erfurt and worked as a scribe in Paris, and who later married Fust’s daughter.

Putting this evidence together, most scholars date the start of work to around 1452 and the completion of printing to 1454 or early 1455. Other early Mainz printing of these years includes indulgence forms dated 1454–55 and a small pamphlet for the year 1455 calling for a crusade against the Turks after the fall of Constantinople, known as the Türkenkalender. These items use different types, and their exact relationship to the Bible enterprise is not fully documented.

The text is the Latin Vulgate, the translation associated with St Jerome that was the standard Bible of the western Church. Gutenberg’s edition follows an emended form of the medieval “Paris Bible”, which had standardised the order and presentation of the biblical books; this form of the text was common in the Rhineland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The exact manuscript used as the printers’ model has not been identified. The edition includes Jerome’s prefaces, and according to the Library of Congress, later printed Latin Bibles, with very few exceptions, were versions of its text.

The typeface is a textura, the formal Gothic script used in liturgical manuscripts. Its dense, dark letters with angular strokes gave the page the look of a luxurious handwritten book. The generous margins, two-column layout and careful spacing reflect the aesthetics of the best manuscripts of the time.

The book seems to have been intended mainly for churches and monasteries, which needed large, legible Bibles for reading aloud in services and during meals. It was expensive, but it could be produced in far greater numbers and much more quickly than a comparable manuscript.

After Gutenberg lost control of the Bible workshop, he seems to have continued printing on a smaller scale. Fust and Schöffer produced the Mainz Psalter in 1457, the first book whose printed colophon names its printers and gives the date of completion, famous also for its initials printed in colour. A 36-line Bible, printed with an earlier version of Gutenberg’s type, probably in Bamberg, followed around 1458–61.

Printing had already begun in Bamberg and Strasbourg by about 1460, before Mainz was sacked in 1462 during a conflict between rival archbishops. The conflict may have encouraged printers to leave the city, and in the following decades the craft spread to other German towns and to Italy, France, the Low Countries and beyond, although the exact routes are not always documented. In 1465 the victorious archbishop, Adolf II of Nassau, appointed Gutenberg a member of his court, with an annual allowance of cloth, grain and wine. Gutenberg died in early 1468; the exact date is unknown, but a document of 26 February 1468 shows that he had died by then. The often-quoted date of 3 February is not documented.

Printing spread quickly. The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), the international database of fifteenth-century European printing hosted by CERL, listed 30,596 editions as of October 2024, including some sixteenth-century items previously misdated to the fifteenth century; the count changes as research continues. Books printed before 1501 are called incunabula, from a Latin word for “cradle”, because they come from the infancy of printing.

The standard census counts 49 surviving copies, complete or incomplete (including two Leipzig copies whose whereabouts were long uncertain), and leaves from at least fourteen further copies survive as fragments. About 20 copies are complete, and twelve are printed on vellum; totals vary slightly with the criteria used. The copies are held in libraries in Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Japan and elsewhere. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York holds three, and copies are also held by the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Keio University in Tokyo, among others. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired its complete paper copy in 1978, keeps it on permanent display and has digitised it.

Only four complete copies on vellum survive: in Göttingen, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress. The Göttingen copy is special because it is kept together with two related documents: the Göttingen Model Book, a manual for illuminators whose patterns match the decoration in the copy, and the Helmasperger Notarial Instrument. Together they were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2001. Göttingen has also made its copy freely available online in digital form.

No complete copy is known to have been sold since 1978, the year the Ransom Center acquired its copy. Leaves separated from damaged copies in the past still occasionally appear on the market.

Long before Gutenberg, printing flourished in East Asia. A printed copy of the Diamond Sutra dated 868, found at Dunhuang in China and now in the British Library, is often called the oldest surviving dated printed book. According to the scholar Shen Kuo, a commoner named Bi Sheng made movable type from baked clay in the Qingli era (1041–1048). In Korea, a 1239 postscript to a woodblock edition of the Buddhist text Nammyeongcheon hwasang song jeungdoga states that it was recut from an edition printed with cast metal type, which shows that metal type was in use earlier. The second volume of the Jikji, printed with cast metal type at Heungdeoksa temple in Cheongju in 1377 and now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type.

Whether knowledge of Asian printing reached Gutenberg is unknown. No established documentary link connects him to East Asian metal-type printing, and his precise casting method and alloy composition remain uncertain. Independent development is a common interpretation among historians, who also recognise the much earlier Asian achievements; some writers have argued for indirect transmission along trade routes, and possible connections remain a subject of research.

One reason movable type had different effects in East Asia and Europe is the writing system. Chinese requires thousands of distinct characters, so woodblocks were often more practical, while an alphabet with a few dozen letters is well suited to reusable type. In Korea, King Sejong created the Hunminjeongeum alphabet (Hangeul) in 1443 and promulgated it in 1446, in the same years in which Gutenberg was developing his printing.

Printing is often called a revolution. The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), argued that print transformed European culture by making texts standardised, widely available and permanently preserved. In her view, these changes helped make possible the Renaissance’s recovery of classical texts, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.

Other scholars have criticised this view. Adrian Johns, in The Nature of the Book (1998), argued that early printed books were not automatically reliable or uniform: piracy, errors and local practices were common, and trust in print had to be built by people and institutions over time. Others point out that manuscript copying continued for centuries, and that the effects of printing depended on literacy, religion, trade and politics.

The Gutenberg Bible itself shows both sides of the story. It is a technological breakthrough, yet it was deliberately designed to imitate manuscripts, sold in small numbers to churches, and finished by hand. Its immediate audience was the medieval Church, not a mass reading public. The more dramatic changes came in the following decades, as cheaper books, pamphlets and vernacular texts multiplied.

Almost everything we know about Gutenberg comes from a small number of legal and financial documents, such as the Strasbourg lawsuit of 1439, loan records, and the Helmasperger Instrument. None of his surviving printed works bears his name. His role is reconstructed by combining these documents with physical study of the books.

Bibliographers compare the surviving copies in detail. Variations in type, the change from 40 to 42 lines, differences between paper and vellum copies, watermarks in the paper, and places where pages were reset reveal how the work was organised and how many compositors and presses were used. Rubricators’ notes and bindings help establish dates and early owners.

New techniques continue to shed light on how the type was made. In 2001 Paul Needham and Blaise Agüera y Arcas of Princeton used digital image analysis of letters in the Scheide Library’s Gutenberg Bible, in a papal document printed in Mainz at about the same time and in other early printing, and found variations that they could not reconcile with casting every copy of a letter from one permanent matrix. They suggested that the earliest type may have been cast in moulds that were destroyed after use, such as moulds of sand. In 2015 Christoph Reske challenged this: comparing letters under the microscope, he found that the early prints were no less uniform than later ones made with a hand mould, and that what he observed was compatible with the punch, matrix and hand-mould system. The question remains debated. Scientific analysis of the ink with a proton beam at the University of California, Davis, published in the early 1980s, found it unusually rich in lead and copper compared with other early inks; the researchers suggested that this may help explain why it has stayed so dark and sharp.