About Gutenberg 42-Line Bible
Mainz, around 1455: roughly 180 copies of a Latin Bible, forty-five of them on hand-burnished calfskin, the rest on Italian linen-rag paper. Two columns, forty-two lines, justified to the millimetre by a punchcutter who had never seen a printed page before.
What survives is not a clean sheet. Five and a half centuries have browned the ground to a warm parchment tone, and the margins were always oversized — left empty on purpose so a rubricator could finish the book by hand in red, blue and gold. Machine precision and hand labour on the same leaf.
- Origin
- Mainz, Holy Roman Empire (Rhineland, Western Europe)
- Era
- 1450–1455 (printing completed by 1455; leaf ~42×30 cm, 1,288 pages)
- Key figures
- Johannes Gutenberg · Johann Fust · Peter Schöffer
- Movements
- Incunabula printing · Gothic Textualis manuscript tradition · Rhenish rubrication and illumination workshops
Gutenberg 42-Line Bible design spec
Colors
Typography
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