Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible by Eric Marshall White (review)

Johann Gutenberg and his bible continue to be objects of fascination and study. While the facts of his life and work seem easy enough to grasp, there is still plenty of scope for interpretation. What remain in plain sight however are the surviving physical products of Gutenberg's printing, in particular the Bibles, and it is with the stories of the individual known copies of the Bible that Eric White has concerned himself here. This forms the main, second part of his book; Part 1 provides background to the introduction of printing and to Gutenberg. What has he found to say? The Bible has been of such interest for so long a time that it might be thought that most of what could be found out already has been. But although four important censuses of the surviving copies were published during the twentieth century, the most important being that of Paul Schwenke in 1923, it is a tribute to White's industry that this large and somewhat unwieldy volume shows just how much more information can be dug up by someone prepared to do the digging and Googling. And detailed copy-censuses very much reflect the welcome focus on what the study of individual copies can tell us about each book or books as a whole.

The first question to be settled by a copy-census compiler is the order of copies. Paul Needham's 1985 listing, reproduced in a revised form as White's Part 3, was based on typographical considerations. White, taking his historical approach, has decided to list the copies in a chronological order, that of the year 'in which the copy was first identified and "canonized" as a specimen'. White eschews a new numbering of his own, keying his arrangement to Needham's. Given that we have enough numbers for the Bibles from the existing censuses this may be thought reasonable, but it does make for a cumbersome amount of working through White's different sections; the general and provenance indexes, comprehensive as they are, take you to individual pages, albeit with numerous references under some entries. To get from an index entry to the description of an individual copy, however, you need to follow the reference from the indexes to the Needham number in Part 3, which then gives you the date to find in the chronological sequence, Part 2. And here the absence of the date in the running-headers means that in many places where the copy-description is extensive, there is yet more leafing about to hit the right place.

This is very much a function of the expansive and discursive nature of the book. White's book is no pared-down bibliography, but an exhaustive (not to say sometimes exhausting) account of the copies—each has its own extended narrative history—situated in a much wider narrative of the history of the Bible in the context of the wider contemporary world as well as of collecting, connoisseurship, and scholarship. As a result, many pieces of information that one might have expected to have found in prefatory material in a traditional bibliography here find their place instead in the narrative. if you want to look up the references to the earlier censuses, for example, which are not easy to extract from the bibliography unless you have some familiarity with the material, you will find them footnoted in the general narrative on p. 84, in the chapter on the discovery of the Bible in the eighteenth century. (This is the moment to say that White has obviously enjoyed his work: the book has exactly a thousand endnotes, which can hardly be accidental.)

This approach raises the question of the audience for the work. There is much here to fascinate the specialist, especially in the way that White's excavations sometimes upend earlier understandings of the history of the copies...