From Engraving by Jacob Houbraken (1698–1780)
To a modern architect of books the obstacles which the printer at that time encountered, with the art itself but a few years old, seem insurmountable. There was the necessity of designing and cutting the first fonts of type, based upon the hand lettering of the period. As is always inevitable in the infancy of any art, this translation from one medium to another repeated rather than corrected the errors of the human hand. The typesetter, instead of being secured from an employment office, had to be made. Gutenberg himself perhaps, had to teach the apprentice the method of joining together the various letters, in a roughly made composing stick of his own invention, in such a way as to maintain regularity in the distances between the stems of the various letters, and thus produce a uniform and pleasing appearance. There existed no proper iron chases in which to lock up the pages of the type, so that while the metal could be made secure at the top and bottom, there are frequent instances where it bulges out on the sides.
John Fust, from an Old Engraving
From the very beginning the printed book had to be a work of art. The patronage of kings and princes had developed the hand-lettered volumes to the highest point of perfection, and, on account of this keen competition with the scribes and their patrons, no printer could afford to devote to any volume less than his utmost artistic taste and mechanical ingenuity. Thus today, if a reader examines the Gutenberg Bible with a critical eye, he will be amazed by the extraordinary evenness in the printing, and the surprisingly accurate alignment of the letters. The glossy blackness of the ink still remains, and the sharpness of the impression is equal to that secured upon a modern cylinder press.
It has been estimated that no less than six hand presses were employed in printing the 641 leaves, composed in double column without numerals, catch words, or signatures. What binder today would undertake to collate such a volume in proper sequence! After the first two divisions had come off the press it was decided to change the original scheme of the pages from 40 to 42 lines. In order to get these two extra lines on the page it was necessary to set all the lines closer together. To accomplish this, some of the type was recast, with minimum shoulder, and the rest of it was actually cut down in height to such an extent that a portion of the curved dots of the i’s was clipped off.
Monographs have been written to explain the variation in the size of the type used in different sections of this book, but what more natural explanation could there be than that the change was involuntary and due to natural causes? In those days the molds which the printer used for casting his types were made sometimes of lead, but more often of wood. As he kept pouring the molten metal into these matrices, the very heat would by degrees enlarge the mold itself, and thus produce lead type of slightly larger size. From time to time, also, the wooden matrices wore out, and the duplicates would not exactly correspond with those they replaced.
In printing these volumes, the precedent was established of leaving blank spaces for the initial letters, which were later filled in by hand. Some of these are plain and some elaborate, serving to make the resemblance to the hand-lettered book even more exact; but the glory of the Gutenberg Bible lies in its typography and presswork rather than in its illuminated letters.
Germany, in the Gutenberg Bible, proved its ability to produce volumes worthy of the invention itself, but as a country it possessed neither the scholars, the manuscripts, nor the patrons to insure the development of the new art. Italy, at the end of the fifteenth century, had become the home of learning, and almost immediately Venice became the Mecca of printers. Workmen who had served their apprenticeships in Germany sought out the country where princes might be expected to become patrons of the new art, where manuscripts were available for copy, and where a public existed both able and willing to purchase the products of the press. The Venetian Republic, quick to appreciate this opportunity, offered its protection and encouragement. Venice itself was the natural market of the world for distribution of goods because of the low cost of sea transportation.