Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
(iv) In August, 1456, Heinrich Cremer, vicar of the collegiate church at
Mainz, recorded his completion of the rubrication and binding of a
magnificent printed Bible in two volumes, now preserved in the
Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, the type of which used to be thought
identical with the larger type of the thirty-line Indulgence mentioned
above, but is now considered to be only closely similar.
For this last undoubted date of rubrication, August, 1456, German
bibliographers have lately substituted a reference to a manuscript date,
1453, in another copy of this printed Bible, now preserved in the
Buchgewerbe-Museum at Leipzig, formerly owned by a well-known German
collector of the last century, Herr Klemm. While, however, this date
appears to have been written at a period approximating to that of the
production of the book, its relevance as evidence of the date of
printing is highly disputable, more especially as there appear to be
signs of erasure near it. Its owner, Herr Klemm, preserved a discreet
silence as to its existence, and it is certainly not obligatory at
present to accept it as valid evidence.
In a work which does not pretend to the dignity of a history of printing
it is impossible to discuss, or even to enumerate, the different
theories as to the events of the years 1453-6, which have been
formulated to account for these facts. The edition of the Bible of which
Heinrich Cremer rubricated the copy now at Paris is so fine a book and
so great a landmark in typographical history, that the desire to regard
it as the production of the man who is credited with the invention of
printing, Johann Gutenberg, easily becomes irresistible. To refuse to
call it the Gutenberg Bible may, indeed, appear almost pedantic, though
its old name, the "Mazarine Bible," which it gained from the accident of
the copy in the Mazarine Library at Paris being the first to attract
attention, still survives, and it is also known among bibliographers as
the "Forty-two Line Bible," a safe uncontroversial title based on the
number of lines in most of its columns. Whoever printed it appears to
have been possessed of ample means and to have been a master of detail
and an excellent organizer. Under the minute examination to which it has
been subjected the book has yielded up some of its secrets, and we know
that it was printed simultaneously on six different presses, that the
body of the type was twice reduced, forty-two lines finally occupying
slightly less space than the forty which had at first formed a column,
that after the printing had begun it was resolved to increase the size
of the edition, and that there is some reason to think that eventually a
hundred and fifty copies were printed on paper and thirty on vellum,[20]
and that the paper was ordered in large quantities and not in small
parcels as it could be paid for. To the present writer it appears that
if Gutenberg had possessed the financial means, the patience and the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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