- The Gutenberg bible is still a rather unique book. It used many specialized ligatures and used variations of letters to achieve a typesetting quality that's still regarded a benchmark today. In total some 300 different glyphs have been used (for a latin text).
- It took almost two decades, a lot of people and money to develop this technology. Two decades later it has spread across all of Europe. This is a typical pattern of groundbreaking inventions you can observe many times across history.
- The major improvement devised by Gutenberg was not press printing, but the movable type. Presses have been used for printing before, though not much in Europe. Similarly, printing wasn't really new, but carving one wood block for each individual page was an insane amount of work, and even beech wood (fun fact: beech is called Buche in Germany, and that's the root of the word Buch / book, both in English and German. Buchstabe (letter) is related as well.) didn't last that long.
Only? It's remarkable that any survived!
ISBN 978-3-8365-6221-8
Tuft's Perseus project (and many, many other sites) have the Vulgate available on-line: see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Pe... .
But can you read Textura?
There are digital facsimiles and photos of several Gutenberg Bibles online. Just give it a try.
