Gutenberg Prints the Bible

The book is a Latin Bible in Jerome’s version, the Vulgate, printed in two folio volumes in a heavy gothic type like the script of missals, most pages in two columns of forty-two lines (Gutenberg Bible Princeton University Library, account of the Scheide copy) (Gutenberg Bible Library of Congress, exhibition note). It does not name its printer. The library at Göttingen, which holds a complete copy on vellum, catalogues it as the work of Johannes Gutenberg at Mainz in partnership with Johannes Fust and Peter Schöffer, and notes that the attribution, though now regarded as certain, does not rest on his name appearing in it (Gutenberg Bible Göttingen State and University Library, catalogue note).

The earliest report of it is a letter. On 12 March 1455 Enea Silvio Piccolomini, bishop of Siena and later Pope Pius II, wrote to Cardinal Juan de Carvajal about a “miraculous man” seen at Frankfurt. He had not seen whole Bibles, he said, but several quires from different books, in lettering so clean and correct that the cardinal could read it without his glasses. Witnesses told him that 158 copies had been completed, though others said 180, and he doubted that one could be bought, since buyers had been found for all of them before the volumes were finished (Piccolomini, Letter to Carvajal (12 March 1455)).

A legal record shows what the venture cost. On 6 November 1455 the notary Ulrich Helmasperger certified at Mainz that Johann Fust had sworn to having advanced Gutenberg 1,550 gulden, which he had himself borrowed at interest, and that he claimed back whatever had not been spent on “the work of the books” for their common profit; the judgment it reports went against Gutenberg (Helmasperger Instrument). Princeton University Library notes that the only fifteenth-century writer to connect Gutenberg’s name with a printed Bible is the Cologne Chronicle of 1499, which has the printer Ulrich Zell recall that the art was invented at Mainz and that its first product was a Latin Bible in large letters (Gutenberg Bible Princeton University Library, account of the Scheide copy).

The holding libraries give slightly different counts. Göttingen estimates the edition at about 180 copies, some 140 on paper and 40 on vellum, and counts 49 complete and incomplete copies known today (Gutenberg Bible Göttingen State and University Library, catalogue note). Princeton speaks of at least 120 paper copies and perhaps 40 on vellum (Gutenberg Bible Princeton University Library, account of the Scheide copy). The Library of Congress describes its own as one of three perfect vellum copies (Gutenberg Bible Library of Congress, exhibition note).

Princeton University Library describes the book as the first large-scale typographic book of the West: it gave readers across Europe copies of the same text that were all but identical, and the Vulgate in this form remained the standard Latin Bible into the sixteenth century (Gutenberg Bible Princeton University Library, account of the Scheide copy).