Forty-two Lines, and a Type Cut to Deceive

The Gutenberg Bible was designed to be mistaken for a manuscript. The type was cut to imitate the formal textura book hand used for liturgical books in the Rhineland, and to do it convincingly Gutenberg needed not one shape for each letter but many: alternative forms, ligatures where letters join, and abbreviated forms, so that a printed line would show the same variety a scribe's hand produces naturally. The result runs to some 290 distinct characters for an alphabet of about two dozen letters.

The sheets left Mainz plain. Initials and rubrics were added by hand afterwards, by decorators the buyer employed locally, which is why no two surviving copies look alike and why some are far more elaborately painted than others. A printed book in 1455 was a half-finished object that its owner completed.

It is a Latin Vulgate in two volumes, set mostly at forty-two lines to the column, which is where the alternative name comes from. Around 180 copies were made, on paper and on vellum. Forty-eight substantially complete copies survive, and their individual histories have been tracked so closely that the movements of particular copies over five centuries are a scholarly literature in themselves.