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.