1.  THE GUTENBERG BIBLE

[BIBLIA LATINA] (the “Gutenberg Bible” or “42-Line Bible”). Fragment of 31 consecutive leaves. [Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg, Johannes Fust, and Peter Schoeffer, in press before October 1454].

The invention of printing with moveable type at Mainz, Germany, c. 1450, did not merely introduce a means of manufacturing multiple books quickly. It introduced to Western culture the essential intellectual concept of the “edition,” that is, the idea that readers in all parts of Europe could consult identical copies of a text, and thereby discuss and agree upon a fixed body of content that was not compromised by the variability of each reader’s manuscript version. Thus, the printing press did not merely spread learning with unprecedented speed; it provided learning with its first reliable foundation for growth.

The most detailed and reliable fifteenth-century account of the European invention of printing with moveable type appears in the illustrated vernacular history known as the “Cologne Chronicle” of 1499. This text includes the early Cologne printer Ulrich Zel’s testimony that Johannes Gutenberg had invented printing in Mainz by 1450, and that “the first book to be printed was the Bible in Latin, with type as large as the type nowadays used in the printing of Missals.” By the end of the nineteenth century, a variety of documentary and material evidence proved that the first substantial printed book in Europe was the undated, unsigned Latin Bible printed with 42 lines of “Missal” type per column, now famous as the “Gutenberg Bible.”

Bridwell Library’s 31 leaves of the Gutenberg Bible, including the books of Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Baruch, came from an incomplete second volume discovered in 1828 in a farmhouse near Trier, Germany. It eventually became the property of a Jewish chemist who sold it through Sotheby’s in 1937 to finance his escape from Nazi Germany to London. The American buyer was Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., who in 1953 turned it over to Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. This firm removed 116 leaves of the New Testament for a collector in Chicago (they are now at the Lilly Library at Indiana University) and sold the 132 remaining leaves individually and in small groups. The largest of these groups, the present 31-leaf fragment, went to John M. Crawford, Jr., of New York City, whose agents sold it to Bridwell Library on 11 June 1970.