Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 29.djvu/297

printers, and therefore the most interesting. printed volume, intrinsically, in existence. The name by which it is usually known is derived from a copy having been found and first identified, or recognised, in the library left by Cardinal Mazarin, by the celebrated De Bure, who died in 1782.

This work is generally believed to have been begun by Gutenburg in or about 1450, and, perhaps, carried to a conclusion by his partners, Fust and Schoiffer, from whom he separated in 1455, or earlier. We are thus able to approximate to the date of the Bible. The Paris National Library has a copy on vellum, in which the rubricator by whom the headings of the chapters and pages were supplied, has put his name in the last page, and the date at which he finished his work: "Henry Cramer, August, 1456." So that it must have been printed, or even finished, in or before 1455. Trithemius says in his Chronicle that he was told by Peter Schoiffer that this edition was executed about 1450; and there are one or two other early allusions to it, one of the earliest being by John Schoiffer, the son of Peter, in the colophon of his edition of Trithemius, 1515. We may, I think, safely conclude that the historians of printing are not wrong in making the assertions about this book with which I commenced; and I have only further to name Mentz as the probable place, perhaps I may say with certainty, the place where it was printed. The cost of printing it must have been very great. According to one of the authorities named already it amounted before twelve sheets were finished to 4000 florins. But, as Fust seems to have foreseen, the cost was nothing in comparison with the price which Bibles fetched in MS. Fust is said to have gone to Paris and actually to have sold his Bibles there as MSS., and to have died in Paris of the plague in 1466. Be this as it may, we cannot but see a curious example of his success in the book before us, for there is every reason to suppose it was thus bought perhaps with a parcel of real MSS., and imported shortly afterwards to remain among MSS., and be itself reckoned as one for perhaps four centuries.

The entire book, of which the volume in the Lambeth Library is a part,^[1] consisted of 641 leaves, according to Horne; but no two copies are quite alike, some having