{"id":34,"date":"2014-09-19T13:48:17","date_gmt":"2014-09-19T13:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/uncategorized\/gutenberg\/"},"modified":"2015-08-19T17:25:47","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T17:25:47","slug":"gutenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/19\/gutenberg\/","title":{"rendered":"550 Years of the Gutenberg Bible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night was the University of Iowa Center for the Book<\/a>‘s Brownell Lecture 2014, and the lecture hall was truly packed for Paul Needham’s talk on “550 Years of the Gutenberg Bible.” Dr Needham is the Scheide Librarian<\/a> at Princeton, a leading expert on the early history of printing, and the foremost expert on the Gutenberg Bible.<\/p>\n

The fifteenth century is well outside of my area of expertise, so I had a rather hazy notion of the significance of the Gutenberg Bible and moveable type before the talk began\u2014but it was not, as I thought, the first printed work in Europe. It wasn’t the first thing printed in Mainz, or even the first text printed by Gutenburg. It was predated by several texts such as the so-called Sibyllenbuch<\/em> Fragment (a work of German-language poetry), or a 31-line indulgence which survives in a copy from Erfurt. The Gutenberg Bible is the first major printed work, however, and the first printed bible.<\/p>\n

It’s also a landmark aesthetic and logistical achievement\u2014another thing I didn’t know was that each copy of the Gutenberg Bible was rubricated and illuminated where it was sold, not as part of the printing process. You can see here to the left a mocked-up example of what each bible would have looked like when it left Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz. (I apologise for the lighting of the photos in this post\u2014it was a dark room, I was a few rows back, and my phone’s camera struggled.)<\/p>\n

Analysing the variations in decoration lets us not only track where copies of the bible were first sold (in Germany, Austria, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, England, and Spain), but also the personal choices which individuals made as to how they wanted their purchase to be decorated. Some copies of the Gutenberg Bible are much more elaborately decorated than others. Others give us a very immediate insight into the decoration process\u2014the copy in the John Rylands Library has a page smeared with red ink, the apparent result of an artist knocking over an ink pot and then using their sleeve to remove the worst of the stain. You can just imagine the furtive “Oops!” (or something cruder, more likely) when the artist realised what they had done.<\/p>\n

\"6a013486c64e2e970c01a73e197140970d\"<\/a>Many of the copies ended up in monastic institutions\u2014given the cost of the two-volume bible, this was most likely the result of pious bequests. The copy at Harvard, for instance, was given to a Brigittine nunnery in the Netherlands towards the end of the fifteenth century. The donor of this copy at least thought this was a big enough deal that he had the book notarised to reflect his gift (you can see in the image to the right the original printed text on the top, a description of the bequest and the bequestor in the middle, and the notarial addition on the bottom). Others, like the copy of the University of Texas, are heavily marked up, letting us track the reading of generations of users as they corrected typos or added annotations at spots they thought particularly important.<\/p>\n

But then\u2014and this is another thing I didn’t know\u2014as the sixteenth century progressed, copies of the Gutenberg Bible started to disappear. Newer, cheaper version of the Latin Vulgate proliferated; the rise of Protestantism meant that many people shifted to using the vernacular bible; and it seems that people no longer remembered that this particular edition was the first printed one. The phrase “Gutenberg Bible” would have meant nothing to people for most of the early modern period. Many copies were sold as waste paper and survive only in scraps that were used as pasteboard. Even Gutenberg’s name was largely forgotten. It was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that people\u2014particularly British collectors\u2014started to properly appreciate the book as an object with a history and to identify and seek out copies of Gutenberg’s first bible. This process was something I would have loved to learn more about, but I get the impression its recounting would be involved and technical, and would need a full lecture in and of itself.<\/p>\n

Dr Needham’s talk concluded with an overview of where some of the copies are today. Almost all are in Europe or the U.S., and in universities or libraries, and in fact one was in the room with us. One imperfect copy was broken up by a New York dealer in the 1920s to be sold off, leaf by leaf\u2014which is how the University of Iowa came to own what is known, rather grandly, as one of the “Noble Fragments” [Catalogue Record<\/a>].<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Further Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n

British Library Gutenberg Bible Bibliography<\/a><\/p>\n

Paul Needham, “The discovery and invention of the Gutenberg bible, 1455 – 1805” in The medieval book: glosses from friends & colleagues of Christopher de Hamel <\/em>(2010), 208-241.<\/p>\n

Paul Needham, “Paul Schwenke and Gutenberg scholarship: the German contribution, 1885-1921” in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America<\/em> 84 (1990), 241-264.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night was the University of Iowa Center for the Book‘s Brownell Lecture 2014, and the lecture hall was truly packed for Paul Needham’s talk …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conferences-lectures"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2955,"url":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2022\/04\/02\/scattered-leaves-and-stanley-slotkin\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":0},"title":"Scattered Leaves and Stanley Slotkin","author":"admin","date":"April 2, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"In teaching book history courses here at Geneseo, I came across what I thought was a small and relatively straightforward portfolio of antiquarian book leaves which are part of the college library\u2019s Special Collections. 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