Prologue du
Premier livre des Rois
in cahier de la Bible à 42 lignes de Gutenberg
Mayence, 1452 (?)
(s.c)

A section of the Gutenberg bible

The first great book of western printing’s history, the 42-line Bible (or the Mazarin Bible) was made around 1452 in Mayence by Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468), Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer. From the 180 copies of the first run, 19 are fully preserved today, but many were broken up to be sold piece by piece. The fragment in Lyon consists of 10 pages and was part of a Bible conserved in Trèves until the Napoleonic era. It contains the prologue and the first 17 chapters of the Books of Kings.
Gutenberg began by printing on two columns of 40 lines per page. He then decided to print on 42 lines and reduced the size of the characters in order to save paper. As this section includes both kinds of page setting, it is likely that is was one of the first to be printed, maybe in 1452.
It is therefore a fascinating document of the very birth of printing.