“Extremely barbarous and immature achievements”

BIBLIA LATINA. [Mainz, Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust, 1455.] 2 volumes, folio, 324 and 317 leaves.  A fine, clean and perfect copy, bound in two volumes, about 1700 A.D., in brown calf, gilt back, red speckled edges. 

So Seymour de Ricci began his description of the Melk abbey copy of the Gutenberg Bible, published in the catalog for the auction on February 15, 1926, at Anderson Galleries in New York City.  De Ricci (1881-1942) was an influential bibliographer of early printing.  His first publication, in 1909, was a survey of works by William Caxton, the first printer in England.  He followed this in 1911 with a census of early printed works from Mainz, the German city where, by 1448, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg had begun to establish his printing press. 

“It seems now well established,” de Ricci wrote in the sale catalog, “that Johann Gutenberg, after some years of laborious experimenting at Strassbourg (1439-1440), came about 1445 to Mainz, where he gradually perfected his invention.”  De Ricci described Gutenberg’s early printed works: the “extremely barbarous and immature achievements,” as he characterized them, which were Gutenberg’s initial publications.  These Latin grammars, printed on single leaves of paper around 1446 or 1447, were printed in a different type: a “missal type,” larger than the type which Gutenberg cast around 1450 for his new project of the Bible.  

 Here we begin to see one of the most curious aspects of the Gutenberg Bible.  In what way was it “first”?  It was not the first printed work: those were the grammars and indulgences with which Gutenberg started his printing efforts. It was not printed from the first metal-forged moveable type: that “missal type,” or “36-line Bible type” had been used by Gutenberg to print his Latin grammars, and would be used again for later works. Depending on the definition of “book,” the Gutenberg Bible might or might not have been the first.  De Ricci’s conclusion, in deciding how to describe the Gutenberg Bible for sale at the Anderson Galleries in 1926, was to name it “therefore the first printed book in the world, the trial pieces which preceded it—and which are only known by scraps and single leaves—having no real claim to be designated as actual books.”   Later, he wrote that it might be described “without the slightest exaggeration not only as the earliest but also as the greatest book in the world.”  According to De Ricci, the Gutenberg Bible was the first printed book—the earliest and greatest—by comparison with the “booklets” and fragmentary survivals of Gutenberg’s first printed works.