Fust and Schoeffer in Mainz, 1457-1466

Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, was Gutenberg’s financial partner for the 42-line Bible project. In late 1455 Fust sued Gutenberg in a dispute over the costs of their joint “Work of the Books,” claiming that Gutenberg owed substantial amounts for misuse of loans involving paper, vellum, ink, an unnamed apparatus, and workers’ wages. Gutenberg countered that most of Fust’s funding was an investment toward their mutual profit, and not subject to repayment with interest.
Fust then joined with Peter Schoeffer, a young scribe who had practiced in Paris, to form a second and very successful printing enterprise. Between 1457 and Fust’s death in 1466, they printed liturgical books of remarkable beauty and technical mastery; the first lengthy book by a post-biblical author; the first law book; the first texts printed with surrounding commentary; and the first classical text published north of the Alps.
(1) Their first publication was a Royal folio Psalter, presenting the Latin psalms and traditional canticles for church worship. Completed 14 August 1457, it was the first book to announce the names of its makers and the date of production. It introduced two sizes of a square gothic typeface showing significant advances on the Gutenberg Bible type. Ornamental red and blue initials were printed simultaneously with the black text in perfect register. Spaces were left for musical notation to be added by hand. The Scheide Library copy, one of ten surviving, is the only one in America.

(2) Fust and Schoeffer’s first publication, presenting the psalms in liturgical order plus traditional canticles, was the first European book to provide the names of its printers and date of production. It introduced two impressive square gothic typefaces – the larger for the psalms, the smaller for hymns – and ornamental red and blue initials, all printed simultaneously in perfect register. Spaces were left for musical notation to be added by hand. Fust and Schoeffer’s typographic innovations were a technical triumph. The edition was sold in two forms: a 175-leaf issue for use in the archdiocese of Mainz and a 143-leaf issue for general monastic use. Ten copies survive, all printed on vellum. Discovered at the Church of St. Victor in Mainz in 1789, this is the only copy in America.

(3) After the Gutenberg Bible was completed, Johann Fust retained possession of the Gutenberg Bible types, and they were used by his shop in the following years to print numerous editions of the Donatus grammar, all surviving only in binding fragments. Some thirteen of these editions employed the several sizes of cast initials that Fust and Schoeffer had first made for the 1457 Psalter. None of the fragments is dated or datable, but one, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, preserves a colophon naming Schoeffer alone as the printer, and so dates after the death of Fust in 1466. The present fragment reveals how handsome these schoolbooks would have been.

Credit: Paul Needham and Eric White - Gutenberg & After exhibition https://dpul.princeton.edu/gutenberg/