Slice It Up

On​ 12 March 1455, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, soon to be Pope Pius II but then bishop of Siena, wrote to his friend Juan de Carvajal, a Spanish cardinal in Rome, describing a ‘viro mirabili’ (miraculous man) he had seen in the market in Frankfurt. The man was selling Bibles in numbers too large to have been the work of manuscript production:

I have not seen complete Bibles, but several quires belonging to different books [of the Bible], exceedingly clean and correct in their script, and without error, which Your Grace could read effortlessly, even without glasses. I learned from numerous witnesses that 158 copies have been completed, although some others say the number is 180. Of the quantity I am not entirely certain; of their completion (if one can have faith in informants) I have no doubt … I shall try, if possible, to buy a copy on your behalf and have it brought here. But I fear it will not be possible, both because of the distance and because they say that ready buyers had all been found even before the volumes had been finished. I can imagine Your Grace’s desire to know how matters stand from the fact that the messenger you sent was quicker than Pegasus! But that’s enough joking.

We can’t be sure about the identity of the miraculous man in Frankfurt, and Piccolomini isn’t describing bound books but quires, or folded sections of freshly printed sheets, but his letter is certainly the earliest document referring to the Latin Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz in early 1455. Like Piccolomini, bibliographers today aren’t sure of the exact print run; perhaps about 180 copies, divided between 135 on large Royal paper and 35 on vellum or calfskin. Of the total, 48 survive, 21 of them complete. The watermarks on the Royal paper editions – a bunch of grapes, a bull’s head, a running ox – still shine brightly. The text was St Jerome’s fourth-century Latin, translated from the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament.

The Gutenberg Bibles that survive today are hybrid texts, a mix of printed Gothic letters and hand-drawn coloured illustrations of the natural world, which were added or commissioned by readers after purchase, turning each near identical printed text into a unique copy, and so complicating the claim, in its foundational moment, that printing is straightforwardly duplicative. In one copy, a peacock gazes up from the foot of the page; in another, falcons and sparrows perch on flowering tendrils which, as they twist around the margins, teeter on the edge of abstraction. In fact, Gutenberg’s Bible would have looked a lot like a handwritten text to 15th-century eyes, not (as some book historians have argued) because print was disguising its own novelty in pursuit of credibility, but more simply because handwritten texts were the only available model. What else could a printed book look like apart from a manuscript book?

It is also in all senses a big book, a tome for the lectern rather than the private study. The Royal edition consists of two large folio volumes, comprising 643 leaves, each 41 x 30 cm, resulting in 1279 pages of 42-lined text and requiring more than three million ‘carefully ordered pieces of movable type’ (Eric White gives us all these numbers in his new study, such is his commitment to exactness). Magnificent handwritten Bibles were already in circulation. Just a few years before Gutenberg’s, the Giant Bible of Mainz was made for the abbey of Johannisberg, the work of a single scribe (he signs himself ‘Calamus fidelis’, or ‘faithful pen’) toiling, or gilding, his way through 459 huge vellum leaves, across two volumes, at a rate of between 240 and 320 lines a day, depending on the daylight, for fifteen months.

The production of Gutenberg’s Bible was no less arduous, a feat of almost unimaginable typesetting complexity: ‘The work inched along,’ White writes, ‘line by line, column by column, page by page.’ The difference, however, was that once it was fixed in place, the assembled metal type could print sheet after sheet, producing hundreds of copies. The scribal output of Calamus fidelis was astounding, but singular. This new concept, of an ‘edition’ of virtually identical texts, had radical implications, not least that readers in different cities and countries could read a printed page and know that they were reading the same thing as everyone else. Gutenberg lost his monopoly on typographic printing in 1454 and his technology soon spread, adopted in the 1470s in Venice, Paris, Lyon, Kraków, Buda and London, and by ‘hundreds of printers across several kingdoms’ over the next fifty years. White estimates that Europe’s 15th-century printers produced more than 28,000 different editions in press runs of hundreds or thousands of copies, meaning Europe was quickly teeming with some ten million printed books. Guillaume Fichet (1433-78), librarian at the Sorbonne, caught this sense of influx in a letter written on New Year’s Day 1471, when he described ‘the new order of book-makers from Germany, who have poured forth everywhere (as from a Trojan Horse)’.

Centuries of printing preceded Gutenberg. As White is careful to describe, Gutenberg was born nine hundred years after printed texts were first produced in China by rubbing paper onto inked, carved woodblocks. A 16-foot scroll made from paper strips printed with carved wooden blocks, known as the Diamond Sutra, was published in China in 868. Movable wooden or ceramic type was developed in China in the 11th century, and in July 1377, as its postscript notes, Korea’s royal printers used movable metal-cast types to print Jikji – a collection of excerpts from generations of monks, designed for students of Buddhism and probably the world’s oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type.

White thinks that Gutenberg wasn’t influenced by this long pre-European tradition. It’s possible that the history of printing is a stitched-together story of the movement of knowledge from East to West, rather as paper-making spread from Asia through the Arab world from the eighth century, to North Africa and eventually to Spain. Gutenberg doesn’t seem to have travelled much, however, and even if a Korean text printed in movable type appeared in Mainz, White is probably right to doubt that Gutenberg could have guessed the method behind it.

But even at home, Gutenberg would have seen other kinds of printing. Block books flourished just as Gutenberg was developing his technology: short books of text and image (some copies have watercolour additions), each page printed from a single carved wooden block. Block books were generally devotional works designed for a popular audience, like the Ars moriendi, guiding the reader towards a good Christian death, or The Apocalypse of St John (John’s vision of a celestial battle between good and evil), or the Biblia pauperum, with images of Old and New Testament stories. Some block books were hybrid works, combining woodcut images and handwritten texts: Exercitium super Pater Noster, for instance, is a series of ten woodcuts of the Lord’s Prayer, with accompanying explanatory texts, attributed to Hendrik van den Bogaerde (1382-1469), a prior at Groenendael, near Brussels. A woodblock could print the same text multiple times, but it was laborious to carve. Individual metal types (letters or symbols) allowed for rearrangement, which made it possible, in White’s words, ‘to print an edition of any text in any language that used the Latin, Greek or Hebrew alphabets’.

It’s not surprising that historians have been preoccupied with what we might call monumental books: the seventeen volumes of the Encyclopédie (1751-65) of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert; or Christopher Plantin’s Biblia Polyglotta, eight folio volumes of parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic, with Latin translations, printed in Antwerp between 1568 and 1573; or John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-38) with its 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints; or The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer printed in 1896 at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (‘a pocket cathedral’, according to Edward Burne-Jones); or Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), the book we call the First Folio but shouldn’t (because it wasn’t). These are big books, both physically and in their impact, but they are also vastly unrepresentative. And in focusing on the connection between print and preservation, we miss the culture of ephemeral texts that Gutenberg’s innovation unleashed. His technology produced thousands of copies of texts that didn’t endure – alongside a few that did – and Gutenberg, like almost all printers after him, kept his business afloat through these slenderest of texts. The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein caught this nicely when she observed that the printing revolution was not ‘centrally about the history of books’, but rather a wider, wilder sea of ‘images and charts, advertisements and maps, official edicts and indulgences’.

The preoccupation with Gutenberg’s Bible has certainly obscured his broader output, and White is helpful in restoring this legacy. The earliest documented European text printed with movable type was not a two-volume Bible but a single-leaf, 31-line indulgence, printed on vellum by Gutenberg and Peter Schoeffer in 1454, and issued at Erfurt. It is a slight, narrow printed strip with blank spaces left for the date, name and town, which would be added by hand before the indulgence was shown to a confessor to secure forgiveness. The real purpose of the indulgence was less spiritual equanimity than finance: to raise funds for Pope Nicholas V’s proposed campaign to defend Cyprus against the Turks. Hundreds of thousands were printed at speeds that must have astonished the watching scribes who had previously produced them by hand. They were distributed by the wagonload to priestly pedlars, and the sale of these indulgences constituted, in White’s words, ‘the first widespread public exposure to the existence of typography’.

Many of Gutenberg’s earliest texts survive not as whole books but as fragments, torn up and used in the bindings of other books. Pieces of what bibliographers call the Mainz Sibyllenbuch (or ‘Book of the Sibyls’) – a prophetic retelling, in German rhyming couplets, of Bible stories and the Last Judgment, rather clumsily printed in bold Gothic type and designed to be read aloud to terrified listeners – were found in this state in Mainz in 1892. Several fragments from Gutenberg’s editions of Donatus’ Ars minor survive inside the spines and covers of other books. The Ars minor was a hugely popular guide to Latin grammar, drawn from Aelius Donatus’ fourth-century teachings, and read to pieces by 15th-century schoolboys – an instance of that paradox of popularity, where books read by many readers tend not to survive, while untouched copies live on. (It is a central feature of books and their histories that reading and damage often go together.) One fragment survived in the binding of a 1479 edition of St Augustine’s De civitate dei, printed in Basel and bound in Seitenstetten, Austria.

These instances of recycling and preservation make clear the role of chance in the survival of books. Fragments of older books surviving in newer books also show the wild fluctuations in value attributed to books at different moments in history. It seems astonishing that interest in Gutenberg’s Bible waned to such an extent that at least fifteen of them ended up sliced into strips to reinforce more desirable titles – such as a handbook of legal process in Saxony from 1666, the Erneuerte und verbesserte Landes und Procesz-Ordnung, printed at Cöthen with a cover made from a repurposed vellum leaf of Gutenberg’s Bible with text from 1 Chronicles 4-5, complete with an elegant rubricated capital ‘F’. As White notes, blank parchment or paper was costly: better, and more economical, to slice up Gutenberg’s Bible.

White’s volume is a ‘biography in books’, meticulous and, in its quiet way, excited about these sometimes fragmentary remains. The focus is on the books in large part because there are insufficient records even to establish an outline biography, let alone provide a sense of Gutenberg’s personal life or thoughts. We have almost no documentation of his first thirty years, and there are big holes in the later life, too. He remains unknowable: an implied but not a felt presence. This is true for all but a small number of 15th-century lives, of course, but it’s impossible to ignore the gulf between Gutenberg’s great invention and his own elusiveness.

Posthumous portraits aren’t much help. The Gutenberg who appears in André Thévet’s Les Vrais Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584) looks suspiciously like Bede or Archimedes or King Skanderbeg or any number of eminences that Thévet depicts. We know that in January 1465 Gutenberg was awarded a generous pension for his service to Adolph II, archbishop of Mainz, the terms of which gave ‘dear and faithful’ Gutenberg (formulaic rhetoric, or a glimpse of character?) a regular set of court clothes, twenty bushels of grain and two large barrels of wine ‘for the use of his house … every year as long as he lives, on condition that he will not sell it or give it away’. He lived only three more years. But most of what we know about his movements comes from scrappier legal documents and the occasional tax return. He borrowed and lent money in Strasbourg in the 1440s, and went into partnership with Johann Fust, who loaned him eight hundred florins for his new printing business – roughly the value, White notes in one of a number of inadvertently comic phrases, ‘of a hundred meaty oxen’. Fust left Gutenberg in 1456 to form a new printing partnership with Peter Schoeffer. Gutenberg seems to have had a habit of falling out with people. A notarised letter of 14 March 1434 records the release of Nikolaus von Wörrstadt from prison after his arrest at Gutenberg’s request for failing to pay him 310 florins of interest (‘the cost of a handsome mansion’). Von Wörrstadt was the leading guildmember of the Mainz council so the quarrel must have turned heads. In 1436, the shoemaker Claus Schotten brought a successful defamation suit after Gutenberg maligned him as a liar. To articulate a life in the language of legal acrimony produces a level of discord that is almost certainly misleading. White judges that these scattered glimpses ‘do not paint a pretty picture of Gutenberg’s character’, but who can say?

No monuments were erected to Gutenberg after his death and he seems quickly to have been forgotten, or replaced by other names. Erasmus, who knew a thing or two about printed books, thought that Fust and Schoeffer had invented printing; others made claims for Johannes Mentelin in Strasbourg, or Laurens Janszoon Coster in Haarlem. Perhaps even more surprising is how quickly Gutenberg’s Bible dwindled into obscurity before, much later, being restored to its foundational position. The Reformation created a huge demand for vernacular Protestant Bibles, while many other Latin Bibles were printed for Catholics. Gutenberg’s edition became ‘entirely obsolete’, and when it began to re-emerge as an object of interest, its perceived nature had changed: no longer a book for devotional practice, it was now a bibliographical origin point. In the 18th and 19th centuries, librarians, antiquarians and grasping collectors such as George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758-1834), hunted down copies as part of a pursuit of artefacts that would constitute a history of printing. At Althorp, Spencer assembled ‘probably the finest private library in Europe’ (according to the contemporary bibliographer Thomas Dibdin) and served as first president of the bibliophilic Roxburghe Club, founded in 1812; he sought out not only Gutenberg’s Bible, but all incunabula (books printed before 1501). Such was the pull of Gutenberg that by 1801 Spencer was even collecting those ephemeral indulgences from 1454 which, once used in confession, had mostly fluttered to the muddy Erfurt ground to be trampled underfoot.