As I've blogged about earlier, I'm reading a fine collection of essays from Daniel Berkeley Updike. Today's essay was “Gutenberg and His Relation to Printers Today”.

Berkeley describes the process of development on the classic 42-line Gutenberg Bible:

Like work undertaken by an experimenter who loved to perfect details as he went along, the book did not progress, or progressed so slowly that Fust [the edition's financer] began to wonder if he would ever get back the money sunk in the scheme. After various quarrels, Gutenberg was made to turn over the types in the printing-office to one of its workers — Peter Schoeffer. It was under his direction that the Bible was finished in the winter of 1455-1456, though by that time the printing office had passed out of Gutenberg's hands. (Updike, 67)

So, the bottom line: the classic 42-line Gutenberg Bible wasn't finished by Gutenberg, and may not reflect his tastes, preferences, and whatnot. However, Updike continues:

He [Gutenberg] still went on with his work and designed another, smaller and less attractive but more workable type. This was employed in the Catholicon of 1460 — a sort of dictionary — and the only book we can safely consider as wholly the work of Gutenberg. (Updike, 67)

So, most folks have mental images of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible type in their heads, and have it positively associated with Gutenberg and his press. But it wasn't Gutenberg's final product.

The internet is very cool, and with a few clicks of some keys and a trip to the Google home page, I located some high-quality scans of Gutenberg's 1460 Catholicon. So hop on over and take a look. If your German is rusty (or non-existent, like mine) the links on the middle left of the page go to images detailing a few pages of the work.

The type is smaller, but (to my humble eyes) seems more readable.