Introduction

What is the Gutenberg Bible?  The new Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is entered by a pair of doors imprinted with a page of its text, some two and a half tons in weight. In 1931, it was the subject of a whodunit, The Gutenberg Mysteries.  It was the one book that novelist and critic Umberto Eco idly fantasized about finding, even while worrying about what he would ever do with it, and how he could ever keep it safe.  In 1962, Marshall McLuhan presented “Gutenberg Man” as the hallmark of modernity, in his The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. In 1969, a thief tried to steal it from Harvard University’s Widener Library, but fell when trying to climb down a rope out of the window.   In the finals for this year’s Olympiades des Métiers at Strasbourg, Gutenberg is the theme for the pastry-makers’ guild, or corporation des pâtissiers.   And in New Haven, Connecticut, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible can be visited at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, between the glass book tower and the marble-clad walls, in a case original to the library’s 1963 design.

The Gutenberg Bible is at once book and icon; political, religious, and cultural symbol; an object to be coveted and cherished; an historical entity and an idea.  The Gutenberg at Beinecke project follows these many different understandings of the Gutenberg Bible, in a series of monthly creative and historical essays on the Gutenberg Bible as material and cultural object.  Over the course of the year, the project will explore the circumstances in which Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg produced the copy of the Bible now known as B42, the 42-line Bible, the Mazarin Bible or the Gutenberg Bible.  It will introduce our complicated and incomplete scholarly understanding of how the Gutenberg Bible was made, and the materials and techniques of its production.  The project will follow the history of the Yale copy of the Gutenberg Bible, also looking at the histories of other copies to ask how, why, and by whom the Gutenberg Bible has been collected, in the twentieth century as in the fifteenth.  We will also look at how the Gutenberg Bible has been imagined, by artists, poets, authors, bibliographers, historians, collectors, and scholars, in Gutenberg’s time as in our own.

Our first issue includes: “Claude & Clarice and the Adventure of the Gutenberg Bible,” the first monthly installment by the pseudonymous K.T. Lemon, which traces an unusual pair of detectives hot on the trail of a 15th-century forger; a history of the Yale copy’s sale at auction in 1926; and an introduction, by the early twentieth-century bibliographer and scholar, Seymour de Ricci, of the characteristics of the Gutenberg Bible as a book.