Gutenberg Bible

By the year 1600, 150 years after Gutenberg's Bible was first exhibited at the Frankfurt Fair, Europe's presses had cranked out something in the region of 350,000 separate titles: a cumulative total of some one hundred million individual copies. The impact o this torrent of print was enormous, but it was possible only because of the development of multifaceted and sophisticated international industry that totally shaped both the medieval book world and the reading public. This book is the story of that transformation. Xvi - Prologue

The Gutenberg Bible was an immediate sensation. When Piccolomini visited the Frankfurt Fair in 1454 he was able to view proof sheets but not a complete copy because the whole edition was already sold out. The astonishingly high rate of survival -- of an estimated print run of 180 copies a full fifty can be identified today -- suggest that from the very beginning this was a book that was cherished and treated with awe. Most of the initial buyers were monasteries and ecclesiastical customers in the immediate viscinity of Mainz, though Piccolomini dispatched samples to the Emperor for his inspection. Institutional customers would have had access to the calligraphical expertise which added the rich decorative illumination that adorns most of the surviving copies. They would also have been able to afford the very high cost. Customers paid around 20 gulden for a paper copy of Gutenberg Bible and 50 for a copy on vellum. By way o comparisons, a stone-built house in Mainz would have cost between 80 and 100 gulden; a master craftsman would have earned between 20 and 30 gulden a year. ~ Page 29

Gutenberg printed around 180 Bibles, on which forty-eight substantially complete copies still survive. Two of them are now in the British Library. Kristian Jenses, a historian of the early printed book, and the British Library’s Head of Collections, described what reveals it to be a printed book, not a manuscript copied down by an unusually consistent scribe:

“The Gutenberg bible is what a user around 1455 would expect a book to look like. If you want to sell something, you need to make something that your customer will recognize and understand. So Gutenberg produced something that looked just like a traditional book. One of the ways you can tell that it is printed is by looking closely at the ink, which has a very shiny surface. When you write a book by hand, you sue a water-based ink. You put your pen into it and the ink runs off. That does not work if you are printing, because the ink will also run off the press and spoil the page. So one of Gutenberg’s inventions was a ink which was not ink. What we call printer’s ink is actually a varnish, which means that the sticks to its surface and does not run, and that means that it looks different. ~ Page 286