Publishing a Bible was no easy task, not only because of its size and the high cost of the undertaking, but also because of the Church’s supervision of the content. Nevertheless in Mainz in the 1450s Johannes Gutenberg started working on an edition of a Bible.
It was a technical triumph – the first book printed in Europe with movable type – and it brought fame to Gutenberg and his associates Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer.
This Bible is made up of two large in-folio volumes containing 324 and 319 sheets respectively. Each page has two 42-line columns of Latin text set in gothic textura type. As in manuscripts, empty spaces were left for the rubricator to paint in the missing initials in red. It was a colossal enterprise requiring the composition of more than three million characters!
Forty-nine copies, some of them incomplete, are known to exist today, most of them being in publicly-owned libraries. In the 19th century, there was a considerable traffic of single leaves like the one displayed here.
The number of copies originally printed is estimated at between 150 and 180, produced over a period of 3 years. They were intended primarily for abbeys and convents, to be read aloud.
For manuscripts and woodblock books, a water-based ink was used. This, being pale and liable to smudge, was ill suited to printing.
Gutenberg had to make a number of trials before finding a shiny, dense ink which dried quickly. It is made by mixing pigments such as lamp black in a binding agent (walnut or linseed oil). According to chemical analysis of the forty-two line Bible, the composition of the ink often varies from one page to another.