Gutenberg comes to Wellington

Iconic status of the Gutenberg Bible

Few books carry the same iconic status as the Gutenberg Bible: the first substantial book printed in Europe by means of movable type as achieved by Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1400–1468) in Mainz, Germany, during the early 1450s.

It was therefore with a true sense of excitement that the Alexander Turnbull Library was able to recently acquire an original leaf of this epoch-making book. The leaf is now on display as a special addition to the Turnbull Library’s centennial exhibition Mīharo Wonder for the final two weeks of the show.

A perfected process

While it is well established that printing was first invented in China and that movable metal type was used in Korea by the thirteenth century, these technologies never spread beyond Asia due to reasons of practicality, aesthetics and philosophical principles. The great achievement of Gutenberg’s invention was in bringing together and perfecting the necessary components of moveable type, printing ink, and a wooden screw-press in order to make printing from type a practical means of book production. It then became possible to produce a large number of identical copies of any given work in a relatively short time.

It also introduced the intellectual concept of the ‘edition’ to Western culture. Readers across Europe could now consult copies of a fixed text not compromised by variabilities found in a manuscript version. This led to the rapid dissemination of knowledge, to the forming of new communities of learning and scholarship, and eventually to the literate mass culture we know today.

It is estimated that Gutenberg produced between 150 and 180 copies of the Latin Vulgate Bible. Forty-eight copies in varying states of completeness are known to survive today, along with hundreds of individual leaves in private and institutional collections around the world – the Turnbull Library now counted among them.

On display at Mīharo Wonder

The folio leaf on display in the exhibition consists of 42 lines of printed text in a lustrous black ink (the Gutenberg Bible is also known as the 42-line Bible – or simply the B42 to hardcore bibliographers).

It contains part of the Book of Isaiah 63:1 to 65:22, which includes the prophet’s pronouncements on God’s mercy and forgiveness (Isaiah 63:9):

In all their affliction He was afflicted, And the Angel of His Presence saved them; In His love and in His pity He redeemed them; And He bore them and carried them All the days of old. (NKJV version)

Visitors to Mīharo Wonder will find the leaf on display next to Alexander Turnbull’s copy of the Liber Chronicarum — an illustrated universal history of the Christian world published in Nuremberg by Anton Koberger in 1493.

The pairing forms a microcosmic lineage of the first few decades of European printing: from Gutenberg’s earliest effort to a work by one of the major printing houses founded towards the end of the fifteenth century.

Indeed, the Turnbull Library is fortunate to hold more than 110 incunabula (books printed before 1501), along with one of the pre-eminent collections of early printed books in New Zealand, amassed over the last century through the generosity of donors, trusted deposits and assiduous purchases.

Acquisition

The acquisition of an object that carries great historical significance within a global context does more than simply fill a gap in the national collection. Its relevance goes beyond just early printed books and what one would see as obvious connections in the Turnbull Library, such as the Bible Society in New Zealand Collection, the Sir Arthur Howard Bible Collection and the Society of Mary and Catholic Diocese of Wellington Collection. The Gutenberg Bible transcends them all.

It can be argued that every book in the library printed after the 1450s — regardless of region or time — can be linked back to the technological advancement achieved by Gutenberg: be it John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) or the first newspaper in te reo Māori, Ko te Karere o Nui Tireni (1842).

Its inclusion in the collection affords the wider community the rare opportunity to learn about the history of the printed book in Europe (and by extension in New Zealand) by means of an original, tangible object.

A fragmentary history

Each copy of the Gutenberg Bible has its own unique history, and the parent copy of this leaf has a story that is incredibly instructive for book history. What follows comes from the book Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible by Eric White (Scheide Librarian and Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Princeton University Library) – a copy of which is in the Turnbull Library General Collection (Ref: G q33).

The parent copy of the leaf went to a Benedictine monastery in Trier, Germany, and is a true survivor from Europe’s first major printed book, despite the fact that at the time no memory of Gutenberg’s role survived to make it anything special and therefore worth preserving. By 1569, the text-block was already falling out of its original covers and parts had been dispersed. The divided portions had their own lives, all in obscurity.

By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the monasteries having been sacked, the portion with Isaiah was found by schoolboys on a farm property near Trier and was saved in 1828 by the local civic librarian Johann Hugo Wyttenbach (1767–1848).

‘Saved’ because one of the stories associated with this copy is that the boys used leaves from the Gutenberg Bible to cover their schoolbooks! While it might sound apocryphal, there is some truth to it: two of the leaves later re-bound into the volume show the tell-tale signs of being folded and bear ‘juvenile doodles left by this sort of use’ (White, p. 195).

Another catastrophe arrived with Hitler’s rise during the 1930s. This time the book played a key role in saving the lives of a Jewish chemist in Berlin – Dr Maximillian Wiernik (1895–1981) – and his family.

Wiernik, who bought the volume in 1934 with the intention to re-sell it for profit, used the £8,000 realised in a Sotheby’s London sale in 1937 to settle in England after the family escaped from Nazi Germany.

Commerce struck the final blow to the book, as subsequent owners removed and sold further leaves, before the remaining folios were sold separately in 1953.

A leaf arrives in New Zealand

Two years later, one of these leaves made its way into the Alfred and Isabel Reed Collection in the Dunedin City Library – the purchase timed to mark the 500th anniversary of the Gutenberg Bible.

The fact that the only two leaves in New Zealand come from the same parent copy and have found their way to a time and place so far removed from fifteenth-century Germany is the latest chapter in their truly remarkable history.

View the Gutenberg Bible leaf

Come down to the Library if you are in Wellington and see this piece of global history.

Mīharo Wonder runs until Saturday 9 October.

Requests to view the Gutenberg Bible leaf after this date are by appointment, which can be made using our Ask a Librarian service. Due to Level 2 distancing protocols, appointment bookings will be made once the library returns to Level 1.