How did the Gutenberg Bible come about?
Before Gutenberg, every book outside Asia had to be copied by hand. Outside Asia, that is: some printed books had been produced in China and Korea using wood and later bronze, but in any case Gutenberg’s process was different. Now it was possible to speed up the process without sacrificing quality. Gutenberg’s first and only large-scale printing enterprise was the Bible in Latin. This is not an obvious choice of text, for the Bible was not very central to the daily life of the Church in the 15th century. Parts of the Bible would have been used in church every day, but not in the order in which they appear in the Bible. The texts of the Bible were reorganised in a Missal to suit the complicated order in which extracts were to be read. Missals were different from region to region, however. Perhaps Gutenberg realised that, in order for a large-scale printing project to be commercially successful, he had to aim at an international market. The Bible might sell fewer copies in each region, b
