This exhibition was developed in 2007, under the leadership of James H. Billington, former Librarian of Congress, and it featured a collection of Bibles in 150 different languages spanning from the 15th to 20th centuries. The Giant Bible of Mainz was one of the features of this exhibit.

This interactive exhibit, created as a part of the 2007 Bible Collection exhibit, allows viewers to compare the Gutenberg Bible and the Giant Bible of Mainz.

Mark Dimunation discusses the Gutenberg Bible and Daniel DeSimone makes a presentation on the Giant Bible of Mainz for the Library's docent training.

The early years of printing in Western Europe was a time of astonishing productivity and creativity. Biblical texts, fables, hagiographies, personal devotionals, natural histories, and illustrated epics filled personal and university libraries. Calling attention to this early moment in the history of the printed codex, historians refer to books printed between 1455 and 1501 as incunabula, the Latin word for "in the cradle." This Story Map explores the pages of several incunabula from the Rare Book and Special Collection Division at the Library of Congress in order to discuss a range of topics, including: the transition from manuscript to print, early hand-printing methods, the invention of European typography, and the eventual integration of woodcut illustrations with typographic texts.

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) is an electronic bibliographic database maintained by the British Library which seeks to catalogue all known incunabula. The database lists books by individual editions, recording standard bibliographic details for each edition as well as giving a brief census of known copies, organized by location.

The Gutenberg Bible is the first monument to the invention of the printing press in western culture. The Morgan is the only institution in the world to have three significant copies, all purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan. Join John McQuillen, Associate Curator of Printed Books & Bindings, to learn about this treasure and why the Morgan has three copies.

Eric Marshall White, Scheide Librarian and Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Princeton University Library: A History of the Gutenberg Bible ­(continued): Lessons Learned and Next Steps – The 2022 Sol. M. and Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin Lecture in Bibliography at the Rare Book School, University of Virginia.

Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress, speaks about the Library's copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

The vellum copy of the Gutenberg Bible, now in the collection of the Göttingen Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Index in 2000. It is characterized by exuberant decoration in line with the model book, which is now also in Göttingen and had been produced in Mainz. This model book was an example for those rubricating and illuminating the Bible.

The Incunabula Collections at the Library of Congress by Peter Martin Van Wingen provides details and insights into the early printing collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division with a particular focus on acquisitions.

Gutenberg’s invention of typography eventually revolutionized the world of text production and distribution. One early printer boasted that a printing shop could produce more in a day than a scribe could in a year, and the ratio is approximately correct. But the printing craft did not produce an immediate explosion. The first two decades of European printing, 1450-1470, have a pace of their own, and these years contain long overlooked mysteries. Much of our knowledge resides in the evidence of fragments of otherwise lost editions, which stand in the shadow of such famous monuments as the Gutenberg Bible and the 1457 Mainz Psalter. The early decades were of deep interest to John H. Scheide (1875–1942, Princeton 1896) who brought the Gutenberg Bible into his private library; and the same decades became a passion for the Bach scholar William H. Scheide (1914–2014, Princeton 1936), who built on his father’s collection, and himself made a significant contribution to our knowledge of the influence of the Gutenberg Bibles. As a result, through “Bill” Scheide’s spectacular bequest, Princeton University owns one of the world’s great collections of earliest European printing. The present exhibition, surveying this period, highlights the century-long collecting program of the two Scheides, father and son. But no single collection, anywhere, is fully comprehensive. Through the generosity of other great libraries, the exhibition has been immeasurably widened and enriched. The loans from England in particular include treasures of early printing that have never before been seen in America, and many of the loans from American libraries have never before gone beyond their walls.

The Gutenberg Bible was printed in Mainz in 1455 by Johann Gutenberg and his associates, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer. Only 48 copies are known to have survived, of which 12 are printed on vellum and 36 on paper. Twenty are complete, two of them at the British Library, one printed on paper (shelfmark C.9.d.3,4.) and one printed on vellum (shelfmark G.12226-7). Many copies, including the British Library’s paper copy, married the new technology of printing with the old, and contain hand-painted decorations to imitate the appearance of an illuminated manuscript.

The Ransom Center's copy represents one of only 20 complete copies in the world that survive intact. Printed on paper, the two volumes remain in early bindings and feature text and decoration added by hand. In the first volume, books of the Bible begin with two types of distinctive, colorful letters. The second volume features more traditional red and blue initials. Acquired in 1978, this Gutenberg Bible is always on view and can be accessed in its entirety through digitization.

The Harvard copy, printed on paper, is one of the 48 surviving copies, only 23 of them complete. It is bound in two volumes and one is always on display in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Rooms.

The Yale copy of the Gutenberg Bible was a gift by Mrs. Edward S. Harkness to the University in 1926, in memory of her mother-in-law, Mrs. Stephen V. Harkness. The copy was acquired by the Philadelphia bookseller and collector A.S.W. Rosenbach at a February 15, 1926 auction at Anderson Galleries in New York City. The copy had been in the collections of the Benedictine monastery of Melk, in Austria, before being sold in 1925 to the British bookseller, Edward Goldston.

The Scheide Library copy, beautifully illuminated and bound there, belonged to Erfurt’s Dominican friars until 1522, when the city adopted Lutheranism. Forgotten for three centuries, it was discovered in an ancient chest of the former Dominican church in 1838. In 1872 the Bible was purchased by a Berlin bookdealer. A year later the American dealer Henry Stevens sold it to George Brinley of Hartford, Conn. Subsequent owners were Hamilton Cole, Gen. Brayton Ives of New York, and James Ellsworth of Chicago. In 1924 the Philadelphia bookseller A. S. W. Rosenbach sold it to John Scheide, whose son William bequeathed it to Princeton University in 2014.

During the 17th century, the dukes at Gottorp Castle near Schleswig built a distinguished library. It was especially famous for its approximately 350 medieval manuscripts, but it also contained more than 10,000 printed books. The entire library became Danish spoils of war in 1713 during the Great Nordic War, and in the middle of the 18th century the collection was incorporated into Royal Danish Library. The library's copy (volume 2) of the famous Gutenberg Bible is one of the items originating from Gottorp. It bears the exlibris of Christian Albrecht (1641-1694), Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, Bishop of Lübeck on the binding.

One of around only 20 complete copies to survive.

The interest of Cambridge’s Gutenberg Bible was magnified some fifty years after Young’s gift, when it was noticed that this copy had been carefully marked up and used as setting copy for the third of three Latin Bibles printed in Strasbourg by Heinrich Eggestein, and completed in late 1469 or early 1470.

Of the 49 extant, more-or-less complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible (12 on vellum, 37 on paper), this copy from the Bavarian State Library is one of only two (along with one copy in the Austrian National Library) in which this table is found as a vestige of the production process.

The Morgan’s third copy, exhibited here, is unusual on several counts. Unlike most copies of the Gutenberg Bible, which split the text evenly across two volumes at the end of the Psalms, this copy comprises just the Old Testament in a single volume—likely a later modification. Twenty-two of its pages feature a unique set of replacement type settings, which indicate that the copy was produced at the very end of the print run. Finally, it also contains the earliest extant compositor’s marks (typesetters’ indications of pagination) introduced when it was used as a model by Fust and Schoeffer, formerly Gutenberg’s financial backer and apprentice, respectively, to print their own bible in 1462.

Eric White, Curator of Rare Books at Princeton University, discusses the Ransom Center’s Gutenberg Bible. White’s talk, “From Mainz to Austin: Carl H. Pforzheimer’s Gutenberg Bible and its Earlier Owners,” focuses on recent scholarship and new discoveries related to the book's early provenance.