Printing the words was only half the job
Gutenberg’s press could reproduce lines of type, but it could not easily give every page the colored initials and decoration readers expected in an important Bible. So the printed pages sometimes included blank spaces where those elements belonged. After printing, skilled artists could fill them by hand, adding features such as decorated initials, borders, and illustrations.
The result was a book made by two different processes: the press supplied the repeatable text, while handwork supplied color and ornament. Because that decoration was added copy by copy, two Bibles could share printed pages yet differ in their finished appearance.
A printed book in a manuscript tradition
The blank spaces were not evidence that the press had failed to print the whole page. They reflected a transitional design choice. Readers were familiar with manuscripts—books copied by hand, often embellished by artists—and decoration helped make a Bible feel like a finished, prestigious object. Printing could multiply the text, but it had not yet replaced every artistic task associated with making a book.
That division also imposed a tradeoff: hand decoration took extra labor, so a printed Bible was not necessarily a fully factory-made object. Gutenberg’s innovation standardized the words; the final look could still depend on the artist who completed each copy.
