The Gutenberg Bible is finished
On this day · 23 February 1455
By tradition dated to this day in 1455, Europe's first major book printed with movable type rolled off the press.
By long tradition, 23 February 1455 marks the completion of the Gutenberg Bible in Mainz, the first substantial book printed in Europe with movable metal type. The exact day is impossible to pin down, but contemporaries place finished copies in the mid-1450s.
Johannes Gutenberg’s edition is known as the 42-line Bible for the columns crowding each page. He printed roughly 180 copies on paper and vellum, each then hand-finished by scribes who added colored initials and headings, so no two survive identical.
Of those, 48 copies endure today, only a handful of them complete.
The achievement was less the book than the method: cast, reusable letters that could be inked and pressed again and again. Within decades, presses spread across the continent, multiplying texts faster than any scriptorium and quietly remaking how knowledge traveled.
Sources & references
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