Engineering & invention · Texts & cultural history
Johannes Gutenberg
Printer and workshop leader
Also known as Johann Gutenberg
Later depiction · Image credit
Who they are
Johannes Gutenberg led the Mainz printing enterprise associated with the Bible produced in 1454–1455 with Johannes Fust and workshop collaborators. Its repeatable printed text, subsequently finished by hand, helped change how books circulated in Europe. The surviving copies provide evidence of production practices as well as the spread of knowledge.
He anchors the timeline’s history of technologies for preserving and distributing texts.
Selected contributions
Primary records
Book · 1454–1455
[Bible in Latin]
The Mainz Bible provides a material record of Gutenberg and Fust’s printing enterprise. Surviving copies combine printed text with hand finishing, showing how early European print production drew on manuscript practices.
Reading scope & citation
Fresh Library of Congress guide description, dating and production/hand-finishing passages; not a page-by-page examination of its Bible.
In the timeline
- 1454 – 1455Gutenberg's workshop prints the Latin Bible
Biography sources & portrait credit
- The Gutenberg Bible at the Library of Congress: Introduction ↗Library of Congress
Portrait credit
Sculptor uncredited in file; photograph by Kenneth C. Zirkel. CC BY-SA 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Later depiction. Cropped to 4:5, resized to 320 × 400 and converted to WebP.
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