AUTHOR/PRINTER: VARIOUS / JOHANNES GUTENBERG
DATE: C. 1455
The Bible is the most sacred text of the Christian faith, comprising the Old and New Testaments, themselves made up of a total of sixty-six books. The Old Testament equates to the Hebrew Bible, which was written over the course of many centuries up until the second century BC, while the books in the New Testament were composed roughly in the latter half of the first century AD. Since Constantine the Great adopted Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD, Christianity has been numerically the world’s biggest religion. As such, it is difficult to overestimate the influence of the Bible, not only on the spiritual life of billions, but in terms of its social, political and cultural impact too. Of all the many editions of the Bible, the Gutenberg Bible is among the most important since it also represents the introduction of movable metal type printing to Europe. As we have seen, Asia was already several decades ahead in such technology, but Gutenberg’s contribution played its own significant part in shaping the future of the world.
Gutenberg was born in Mainz around 1400 and worked as an engraver, inventor and, of course, printer. While the genesis of his printing press is not clear, it seems that, after a number of commercial misadventures, he spent much of the 1440s perfecting it. Because of the lack of East–West cultural exchange, he did not build upon the existing Asian expertise but rather invented his own original system from scratch.
He perfected an alloy of lead, tin and antimony that allowed for the production of cheap, durable type, as well as a hand mould for casting it. He also worked on the creation of oil-based inks that, unlike the water-based ones in wide currency, would not simply roll off the type. In effect, he realized you needed something akin to a varnish to stain the pages, rather than an absorbable ink as had traditionally been used. He also took inspiration from agricultural presses to develop the printing press, taking out much of the time-consuming effort of having to hand-print. If he was not the first to join the game of movable type printing, he is arguably the single greatest visionary to have played it. The result of his efforts was the beginning of mass communication.
Gutenberg’s press was up and operating by 1450, but it was his Bible of 1455 that stands as his masterpiece. Although no two copies were identical, they customarily comprised some 1,288 pages bound in two volumes, each page made up of 42 lines. Some were printed on paper, others on vellum (with some 170 calf skins estimated to have been required for a single edition). Some had their titles and marginalia printed in different-coloured inks, while later copies often had such details added by hand – presumably to cut the time and cost of production. Each copy sold for somewhere in the region of thirty florins – a small fortune (around three years’ salary for a clerk) that meant most went to monasteries and universities, or, occasionally, to a super-wealthy individual. For such a landmark work, Gutenberg’s Bible had a tiny print run, probably not exceeding two hundred copies in the first few years of production.
KING JAMES BIBLE
Another landmark edition of the Bible is the King James Version, which first came into print in 1611. In an age of intense religious disharmony, the edition was commissioned by James I of England (and VI of Scotland) in 1604. Its aim was to bring a uniformity to the scriptures, countering religious tensions by communicating the biblical message in language accessible to the population at large. The text was divided into chunks, each of which was translated by a panel of experts. The result is a work of intense poetry that is regarded as among the finest of any English-language work. It added a number of phrases to the English lexicon too, among them ‘bottomless pit’, ‘eye for an eye’, ‘scapegoat’, ‘a law unto themselves’, ‘give up the ghost’, ‘Physician, heal thyself’, ‘the powers that be’, ‘the skin of my teeth’ and ‘vengeance is mine’.
Nor did it do much for his bank balance, either. Setting up his business had taken years and was capital-intensive, meaning that he had to rely on a number of business partners. One of the most important was Johann Fust, who sued Gutenberg for non-payment of a loan related to the Bibles. Gutenberg lost and had to hand over much of his printing hardware as well as unsold copies of the book itself. The project put its creator on the brink of financial meltdown and it is unlikely that he ever turned any real profit from the undertaking.
Yet the quality of his work was recognized from the outset. Around the time that Gutenberg was being sued by his erstwhile investor, a Catholic priest called Enea Silvio Bartolomeo – who a few years later would be elected Pope, taking the name Pius II – saw some promotional pages in Frankfurt and reported on them to the Spanish Cardinal Carvajal in Rome. They were, Bartolomeo said, ‘exceedingly clean and correct in their script, and without error, such as Your Excellency could read effortlessly without glasses’. Today, fewer than fifty copies of the Gutenberg Bible are known to survive, most in the possession of institutions. If they were expensive in their day, they are now virtually priceless. The last complete edition sold at auction was back in 1978, when it fetched US$3.3 million. A single volume went for US$5.4 million nine years later, and single sheets have sold for as much as US$150,000. Whether that would have delighted or infuriated the impoverished Gutenberg is uncertain.
Gutenberg’s contribution to civilization is at least widely acknowledged now. By paving the way for the mass production of books in Europe, and by extension the New World, he was instrumental in producing a better-informed and better-educated populace. Without him, the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment would all have looked very different. It may even be said that the Gutenberg Bible was the gateway to the modern age. At the end of the last century, Time Life magazine went so far as to say that Gutenberg’s technical innovations represented the pinnacle of human achievement in the last millennium. His Bible was a Good Book indeed.