
When Johann Gutenberg and his team published their Bible in the mid-1450s, what they were selling to buyers were sets of sheets, sheets of either paper or parchment that had text printed on them. What they were not selling were books—not, at least, if we take “book,” as we usually do, to imply a codex that is ready to read by turning a series of leaves held together at one edge. As I have written before, when a monastery, church, or private individual bought a Bible from Gutenberg, they had to find a scribe to add red text to spaces that the printers had left blank. Gutenberg’s customers had to find bookbinders, too.
Like the manuscript volumes that existed before (and alongside) them, the earliest printed books in Europe were made by bringing sheets of paper or parchment together into a series of folded units called gatherings, or quires. Bookbinders were responsible for ensuring that quires were correctly assembled and in order before sewing them onto supports and (usually) adding covers.
Indeed, as a handwritten note at the bottom of the page on the left tells us, at least one binder taking on the Gutenberg Bible made a mistake. In translation, the note reads:
Turn ten leaves forward, and read to the sign, ☞, [where the text will begin] coronam interrasilem.
Today, the symbol and correct text are on the facing page, but this and two further notes tell us that an earlier binder had flipped two quires: the Bible’s sixth quire was once bound before the fifth, not after. The first note, at the end of the fourth quire, says to skip past the ten leaves of what should have been the sixth, to reach the beginning of what should have been the fifth, the one that starts with “coronam interrasilem.” Then, at the end of that quire’s ten leaves, another note instructs the reader to turn back twenty leaves to the beginning of the quire that they had skipped before:
* Some copies of the Gutenberg Bible with minimally trimmed leaves preserve handwritten quire and/or sheet numbers, but we do not know whether these were added in the printing house or after sale by someone with knowledge of the Latin Bible. (For this information I would like to thank Eric White, Curator of Rare Books at Princeton.)