The Gutenberg Bible (42-line Bible)
The Latin Vulgate printed at Mainz with movable type in two folio volumes, the first large book printed in Europe. The printer is not named in it. Copies survive on paper and on vellum.
See the object at gutenberg-digital.p.sub.uni-goettingen.de ↗Library of Congress copy, on vellum ↗Princeton University Library, Scheide copy, with the fifteenth-century sources ↗
The book does not name its printer. The Göttingen library catalogues its vellum copy as printed at Mainz by “the printer of the 42-line Bible (Johannes Gutenberg, with Johannes Fust and Peter Schöffer), about 1454, not after August 1456”, and notes that the attribution to Johannes Gutenberg, though now accepted, does not rest on his name appearing in it. The text is Jerome’s Latin Bible, set in two columns of forty-two lines in a type modelled on the formal hand of missals.
The Library of Congress describes its own copy as one of three perfect copies on vellum, the others being in Paris and London. Princeton, which holds the Scheide copy, counts 643 leaves. Estimates of the number printed and the number surviving differ slightly from library to library. See Gutenberg Prints the Bible.
Cited in
- c. 1454–1455, estimated date