Gutenberg prints the Bible

The story

Books copied by hand

Before Gutenberg every book in Europe was written by hand. In monasteries and in the workshops of scribes, copyists wrote out a text word by word, for months or years, on parchment or paper. A book cost a huge amount, as much as several years' pay for an office clerk, and very few people could afford one. Every copy was a little different from the others, because whoever was copying could make mistakes or change something without noticing.

In China and Korea people had been printing for centuries: in China they used carved wooden blocks, and in Korea, at least since the 13th century, movable metal type. In Europe, however, there was still little printing. Woodcuts, that is, prints made with carved wooden blocks, were used for pictures and a few short texts, but carving a whole page on wood for every book took a very long time.

Johannes Gutenberg's idea

Johannes Gutenberg was born in Mainz, in Germany, around 1400. He was a goldsmith, which means he knew how to work metals, and this was decisive. He realised that many small letters could be cast in metal, one for each letter of the alphabet, all identical to each other, and used to put together a page. When the printing was finished, the letters could be taken apart and used again for another page. This was the system of “movable type”.

Gutenberg had to solve many practical problems. To cast the letters he invented an adjustable mould, into which he poured an alloy of lead, tin and antimony that cooled quickly and stayed hard. He developed an oil-based ink, thicker than the ink of the copyists, which stuck well to metal. And he adapted for printing the press, a screw machine used for squeezing grapes and olives, which pressed the sheet against the inked type.

Setting a page was patient work. The compositor chose the letters one by one from a case divided into compartments and arranged them, back to front like in a mirror, on a tray. Then the ink was spread, the sheet was laid on top and the press was lowered. In one day a team of workers could print hundreds of sheets, a pace that no copyist could have dreamed of.

The 42-line Bible

To get the technique going, money was needed, and Gutenberg borrowed some from a wealthy financier of Mainz, Johann Fust. The result of this work was the Bible in Latin, printed around 1455, called the “42-line Bible” because each column held forty-two lines. Each page had two columns, and the whole work was in two volumes, with a total of about twelve hundred pages.

It is thought that about one hundred and eighty copies were printed, some on parchment and others on paper. About forty-nine survive, whole or in part. Some initial letters and decorations were added by hand, after printing, by illuminators, because the readers of the time wanted books as beautiful as those copied by hand.

Gutenberg, however, had trouble with Fust: Fust asked for the loan to be repaid, and in 1455 the print shop passed to him, in a lawsuit that historians piece together from documents. Gutenberg died in Mainz in 1468, without being rich. The trade he had invented, however, spread across the whole of Europe.

After the Bible

In the following decades printing spread with incredible speed. By 1500, less than half a century later, there were printing shops in more than two hundred and fifty European cities (this is an estimate), and millions of volumes had been printed. The price of books collapsed. Books produced before 1501 are called “incunabula”, which in Latin means “cradle”, because they are the books of the infancy of printing.