On this day 554 years ago, the Gutenberg Bible, a 1282-page Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, was first published. 180 of the Bibles were printed, 45 of them on vellum and 135 on paper. Each was bound in two volumes. 48 copies of the Gutenberg Bible still exist, and 21 of them are in perfect condition. Preparations for the first print run began in or about 1450, so the book took several years to produce.
The pages were printed using movable type. It took a craftsman about a day to carve a single letter, and this was used as a mould into which molten lead was poured, producing multiple reproductions of each letter which could then be set together as type for stamping onto a page. The Gutenberg Bible used a master set of 290 characters including upper case and lower case letters, punctuation marks, and ligatures.
Although the individual elements of Gutenberg’s invention were previously known – the idea of using a stamping process to print pages, the idea of combining pages to make books, even the idea of using movable type – and although Gutenberg’s efforts went largely unrecognised during his own lifetime, the explosion of knowledge which transformed the Western world can be traced back to that first printing press, and some regard it as the most important invention of the second millennium.