1448 – Gutenberg sets up a printing shop in Mainz

1448 – Gutenberg sets up a printing shop in Mainz

Among his first publications printed using movable type are the ‘Poem of the Last Judgment’ and the ‘Calendar for 1448’. Around 1450 Gutenberg begins printing bibles. The first edition has 40 lines per page.

1455 – Gutenberg Bible

Gutenberg prints around 180 copies of a 42-line bible which is referred to as the Gutenberg Bible. It is considered the first mass-produced book. The text is set in gothic type. Customers can have their copy decorated manually.

Ironically enough Gutenberg goes bankrupt in 1455 when his investor Johann Faust forecloses on the mortgage used to finance the building of the press. Faust gets hold of the printing equipment as well as the copies of the bible that have already been printed.

It was once believed that Johann Fust was working for the devil. After several of Gutenberg’s bibles were sold to King Louis XI of France, it was decided that Fust was performing witchcraft. It was discovered that all of the letters in these bibles, presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts, were oddly identical. Fust had sold 50 bibles in Paris and the people there could not fathom the making and selling of so many bibles so quickly, because printing had not come to the forefront yet in France. Parisians figured that the devil had something to do with the making of these copies, and Fust was thrown into jail on charges of witchcraft. He was eventually released, since it was proved he was running a business in which printing enabled the rapid production of multiple copies of the same text.

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