bavarikon4UDescription
None of the three editions of the Latin Bible printed before 1462 contains information about the place of printing, the printer, or the date of publication. The relative chronology of the oldest Bible editions thus relies on textual interdependencies and the typographical material used. The so-called "thirty-six-line Bible", also known as B36, was based on a copy of the Gutenberg Bible (known as B42), as can be concluded from a typesetting error in the Stuttgart copy of the B36, where one page of the B42 was accidentally skipped. In contrast to Gutenberg, the printer set the text more generously, reducing the number of lines per column from 42 to 36. This made the edition considerably more voluminous - with 1,764 printed pages, it comprises almost 500 more than the Gutenberg Bible. As a consequence, it was often divided into three volumes. The Munich copy, however, is incomplete, containing only the second volume. In addition, numerous fragments and the rare printed instructions for the rubricator are preserved in the Bavarian State Library. The edition was printed using a modified form of the types employed by Johann Gutenberg in his first years as a printer to produce calendars and editions of the grammar by Donatus. Later, Gutenberg passed the types on to one of his workmen. In 1461, Albrecht Pfister, a printer working in Bamberg, used this so-called Urtype (original type) to print the first German-language edition of a collection of fables, the Edelstein of Ulrich Boner. Since Pfister worked for the bishop of Bamberg and several copies of the B36 originally belonged to monasteries in this diocese, it seems likely that this edition was printed in Bamberg. The copy originally belonged to the Swabian Benedictine monastery of Fultenbach and came to Munich in 1915 through the Kreis- und Studienbibliothek of Dillingen. It bears a contemporary binding with blind-tooled decoration ascribed to a bookbindery in Bamberg.