bavarikon4UDescription
The beginning of European letterpress printing with movable type saw a great feat accomplished: the printing of the Latin Bible in the so-called Vulgate version, which was produced by Johannes Gutenberg (around 1397-1468) with the collaboration of Peter Schöffer. By the end of 1454 the printing of the Bible was already well advanced, and by spring 1455 about 200 copies printed on paper and parchment had been completely sold out. The Gutenberg Bible is regarded as the most important work of early 15th century book printing. The typographic design imitates the broken dense fonts (textura) of contemporary bible manuscripts. Gutenberg opted for an arrangement of 42 lines per text column and omitted the headings and initials from the print. Meaning that the buyer could enter them themselves or commission their addition. Some of the copies were printed on parchment, the larger part on paper. There are still 49 more or less complete copies printed on paper worldwide. Two of them are located in Bavaria – one in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), the other in the Hofbibliothek (Court Library) Aschaffenburg. The copy of the BSB arrived in Munich from Andechs Monastery in 1803. It is rubricated, and also decorated with initials and with a gold ground initial with tendrils in the margins at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. One special feature is the "tabula rubricarum", which served as instructions for the rubricator and contains a list of chapter headings that had to be entered by hand in red ink. The copy in the Court Library comes from the Charterhouse book collection in Mainz and was transferred by Elector Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal (ruled 1774-1802) to his private book collection in 1781. 14 sheets were removed from the books of Ezra III and IV in the first volume (Old Testament), as the books were not considered canonical. // Datum: 2020