I imagine the man whose name has
filtered through the centuries—not
the master printer with his innovative
press, but that of Henricus Cremer,
the rubricator who inked red capital
letters onto delicate paper,
whose hands bound and inscribed
that Bible in August 1456. He could
not have known, nor could Gutenberg,
that the first run of 180 copies would
launch a great communications
revolution, sending extraordinary
amounts of written knowledge into
the hands of ordinary people, which
trickled through 502 years to a baby
girl born in a land of citrus and sunshine
(not to mention Disneyland), who would
grow into a writer whose father would
bring home her first printing press and
a mother who’d type the girl’s words
onto a stencil to make her first newspaper.
She had no idea about the great tradition
she was carrying on, had not yet learned
of Gutenberg or those who toiled to create
the famous Bibles, though she loved the heft
of thick metal type in her palms, individual
letters and numbers and pieces of punctuation
that, when combined, gave voice to the unspoken,
gave the gift of reading to those who
previously could not, and gave the power
of word after mighty word to mute paper,
which the printers in Mainz certainly did,
making book after book with their clever
minds and gloriously ink-stained hands.
Güd wrtr 
A copy of the Gutenberg Bible resides relatively near to you at the Huntington Museum and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena. Known as Number 36, it consists of two volumes (which are rotated out for conservation reasons) and it is the only copy in the western U.S. When I last visited, I was amazed at its beautifully-hand-illuminated initial caps and borders and the crispness and perfection of its texts. Our guide told us museum curators turn the pages daily to reveal new treasures in the exquisite vellum leaves of the books. The museum acquired Number 36 in 1911 at a cost of $50,000 ($1.7 million in today’s dollars).
Ironically, the movable typeface created for the Latin text was designed to mimic the traditional hand-written Bible manuscripts of the time.
Thank you, Terry, for this great story about No. 36 at the Huntington Library. I’ll have to pay it a visit one day!
And yes, that hard-to-read font simulating the writing of all those scribes certainly made its way into modern times… often in newspaper mastheads!