Hereditas Antikvárium

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11. Könyvárverés

(Mainz, 1460. Johann Gutenberg.).
A fragment of the 185th leaf of one of the first publications made in the workshop of the father of book printing, Johann Gutenberg, in Mainz.
We have few sources left about Gutenberg's life. He was born as Johannes Gensfleisch in Mainz on the Rhine. We do not know the exact year of his birth, researchers dated it between 1393 and 1406. According to contemporary documents, he had already experimented with book printing in Strasbourg around 1437. In 1439, he founded a company with two partners to make so-called "mirrors" (Spiegel), which they wanted to sell on the occasion of the pilgrimage to Aachen. By mirrors, we must mean publications such as the „Speculum Humanae Salvationis” (a famous religious pamphlet of the time). He also bought certain "materials for printing" from the goldsmith Hans Dünne, and the turner Conrad Saspach made a press for him. His truly brilliant invention was the arrangement of the casting tool and the already-known separate processes into a single process. Its earliest surviving print - dated about 1445 - is a fragment of the Last Judgment (Fragment vom Weltgericht). This was already made in Mainz. Gutenberg's early publications were immensely popular, such as Donatuses (Latin language textbooks), an edition containing prophecies and four calendars (one of them is the famous Turkish calendar, which reports on the victory of János Hunyadi over the Turks, so this is the very first Hungarica). These are followed by his main work, the 42-line Bible.
The "Catholicon" - attributed to Gutenberg by researchers - is a dictionary supplemented with Latin grammar and edited by the Dominican monk Johannes Balbus de Janua in 1286. This is the very first print made by using the stereotyping process. The colophon does not name the printer, but this is the first book to name its place of printing – Mainz – and mention the printing technique as well: "With the help of Omnipotent God, at Whose very nod the tongues of infants are made eloquent, and Who often reveals to the humble what He withholds from the wise - this excellent book, Catholicon, has been printed in the goodly city of Mainz, in the glorious German nation, and it has been brought to completion in the year of our Lord's incarnation, 1460 - not by means of reed, stylus, or quill, but with the miraculous concurrence of punches and types cast in moulds".
Paul Needham convincingly proves in his study (New York, 1982) that the first edition of the Catholicon and the two later printings (around 1469 and 1472) were not made with set, movable type, but he first used the revolutionary method of two-line printing slugs, thereby finding "a solution to the challenge of permanently fixing typographical compositions" (Needham, p. 432). After this first - surprisingly early - use of the procedure, the stereotype was only used at the end of the 17th century.
Original Gutenberg prints are seldom in the market. A copy of the Catholicon appeared in 1753 when Hans Sloane's bequest was offered to the newly founded British Museum at a nominal price. The museum sold the item – considered a duplicate – around 1804. It next appeared in 1908 at the Henry W. Poor's Library auction. It was then acquired by Alvin W. Krech. From his possession, it passed into the possession of Edmond Byrne Hackett in the mid-1930s, who sold it sheet by sheet via The Brick Row Book Shop Inc with Margaret Bingham Stillwell's bibliographical essay "Gutenberg and the Catholicon of 1460". As far as we know, there is only one intact Gutenberg - sheet in Hungary, a leaf of the 42-line Bible in the Academic Library. The paper was donated to the library in the 1920s. In addition, the National Széchény Library preserves one, and the Sopron archives two fragmentary pages from the 42-line Holy Scripture. In addition, a fragmentary page of the 36-line Bible, which is also in Sopron, can be linked to Gutenberg's name. The 36-line Bible was made with Gutenberg's type, possibly with his help, but certainly in Bamberg.
Dimensions: 123 x 133 mm. Framed, showing both sides of the incunabulum and the copy of the missing part of the leaf.
GW 3182., ISTC No. ib00020000.