5/7/2023 0 Comments Gutenberg bibleWithout books and computers you wouldn't be able to learn, to pass on information, or to share scientific discoveries. Think about how important information is today. While this may not sound like a big deal at first, the printing press is often considered as the most important invention in modern times. Johannes Gutenberg introduced the concept of movable type and the printing press to Europe. Best known for: Introduced movable type and the printing press to Europe.3 (1985): 303–374.įiled Under: Books + Manuscripts, Featured1 Tagged With: early books and manuscripts, Gutenberg Bible, Johann Gutenberg About Aaron T.By Unknown Biographies > Inventors and Scientists * Paul Needham, “The Paper Supply of the Gutenberg Bible,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 79, No. With Europe’s earliest printed books, even blank space has a story to tell. In fact, Princeton curator Paul Needham believes that the page from Ezekiel belongs to one of the very last groups of sheets that the Bible team printed.* Everything else, except for some sheets that needed to be reprinted because of the print-run increase, had already been finished. The compositor tackling the end of Ezekiel couldn’t move on to Daniel because the page on the right had already gone through the press: there was no text left to set. On the left, though, there’s a healthy amount of blank space at the end of the second column. To be maximally efficient, pages of the Gutenberg Bible were supposed to look like the one on the right, with two dense columns of justified text that run the full length of the page. In the image above, the end of Ezekiel (left) marks the transition between the third typesetting unit’s first division of text and its second, which begins with the Prologue to Daniel (right). Other pages that signal typesetting divisions aren’t totally blank but have a column of text that doesn’t reach the bottom. (The nine blank pages are why I wrote above that there are 1,277 pages with text on them and not 1,286, which is total number of pages you’ll usually see given in literature about the Gutenberg Bible.) Leaves 454 verso and 455 recto of the Ransom Center’s Gutenberg Bible. As in the case of the Ransom Center’s copy, binders often removed these terminal blanks for use elsewhere. And in some copies-the most complete of complete copies-there are two blank leaves at the very end of the whole Bible, ones with nothing on either of their two sides. In a complete Gutenberg Bible, the backs (versos) of five leaves have nothing on them at all. Two blank pages in the Ransom Center’s Gutenberg Bible, fols. While watermarks tell most of this story, some evidence is in plain sight: a typesetter that finished with their section before they’d filled a page had little choice but to leave some or all of it blank. There is also evidence that each unit further divided their text to create additional efficiencies. In order for the four units to start at the same time, the text of the Bible first had to be divided and assigned. Extensive analysis has revealed patterns of where these different stocks appear in surviving copies, leading to the conclusion that four units of compositors began setting type simultaneously, no doubt in an effort to speed up the printing process and get the book to buyers sooner-and get paid sooner. There’s the famous bull’s head, two types of grape clusters, and an ox. It has long been known that Gutenberg’s team used different stocks of paper in the course of printing his Bible edition, each defined by one of four watermark designs. These photographs from the Ransom Center’s copy were taken with the aid of transmitted light and have been edited to increase contrast. The four basic watermarks that appear in copies of the Gutenberg Bible. I think we’d all agree that that’s a lot of work. With some rough multiplication, we end up with well over 3,000,000 times that someone had to pick up a piece of type and put it into a page forme and, then, after all copies of that page had been printed, take that piece of type out of the page forme and put it back so it could be used again. And some pages had to be set twice, because Gutenberg decided to increase the Bible’s print run. Each full page required that approximately 2,500 individual pieces of metal type be set by hand, one at a time. A complete copy, like the Ransom Center’s, includes 1,277 large pages that have text printed on them. Even with a print run of fewer than 200 copies, the Gutenberg Bible was a major undertaking.
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