had been mortgaged to, one of the many ecclesiastical bodies of that town. There is evidence that Gutenberg frequently borrowed money from wealthy monasteries. The imperfect workmanship of the first section is, apparently, the work of a printer in the beginning of his practice, when he had not discovered all the tools and implements which he afterward used with so much success.[1]
The Bible of 36 lines should have been in press a long time, for it cannot be supposed that Gutenberg had the means to do this work with regularity. His office was destitute of composing sticks and rules, iron chases, galleys, and imposing stones. Deprived of these and other labor-saving tools, without the expertness acquired by practice, frequently delayed by the corrections of the reader, the failures of the type-founder and the errors of pressmen, it is not probable that the compositor perfected more than one page a day. He may have done less. Even if, as Madden supposes, two or more compositors were engaged on this, as they were upon other early work, the Bible of 36 lines should have been in press about three years.[2]
The newness of the types seems to favor the opinion that this must be the earlier edition. The same types, or types cast from the same matrices, were frequently used in little books printed between the years 1451 and 1462, but they always appear with worn and blunted faces, as if they had
- ↑ In the first essays of printing, great difficulties were encountered. For when they [the first printers] were printing the Bible, they were obliged to expend more than four thousand florins before they had printed three sections. Trithemius, as reprinted by Wolf, Monumenta Typographica, vol. ii, p. 654
- ↑ These evidences, which seem to favor the theory of the priority of the Bible of 36 lines, combine many features of probability, but they are not free from objections. Too little printed by is known about the book to warrant a positive statement as to its age. In nearly all the popular treatises on printing, the Bible of 42 lines is specified as the first book of Gutenberg, but it is the belief of many of the most learned bibliographers, from Zapf to Dldot and Madden, that the Bible of 36 lines is the older edition. The theory that it must have been printed by Gutenberg between 1457 and 1459, and the proposition that it may have been Albert Pfister of Bamberg at or soon after that time, will be examined on an advanced page.
