The oldest page in the book

After allowing me a few minutes to appreciate his Gutenberg Bible in silence, Scheide embarked on a detailed introduction to the book, beginning with the binding and the large margins, which have been preserved untouched for more than five centuries. “Because the binding is original, nothing has been trimmed off the sides,” he explained, pointing between the leaves of the book to the fibers that fastened the signatures, or folded sheets of paper, into a “gathering”. “There are threads down in there, string, and what they did was put this filament in so the string won’t cut the paper.” He proceeded deliberately, knowing exactly where he wanted to go.
“Now here,” he said, “these may well be the most interesting pages in the volume. You ought to come closer if you want to. Look, there’s a little more space between the lines on this page than there is on the others. Those others are slightly more crowded. Now, if you take the trouble to count – use the eraser end of your pencil – you’re supposed to get forty-two lines. But what do you get there? You get forty. All these others, of course, have forty-two. But this has forty, and it’s the same length as the pages with forty-two. Here, let’s find a Q in this column. Look at this Q. Do you see a spike coming out of the top? How about over there. Now, you don’t see a spike. It’s been filed off. Let’s take a look at a capital P, you see the same thing. See the spike up there? Filed down? “This” – he pointed to the section with spikes – “has been thought to be the original form of the type. And this over here, this is from the second press. Gutenberg must have set up a second press, and he set it up to begin at this point in the Bible. What must have happened is they printed for a while with this forty-line format, and then somebody said, ‘Oh, we’re getting a lot more orders, you’ve got to print more copies. This is wasting paper, we’ve got to get more type on a page.’ Well, they tried hard, and they figured out a way to get two more lines on a page. And the way they did it was to file down the ascenders and descenders [parts of lower-case letters that rise above or descend below the main of the letter (e.g., h or y) of certain letters. Any copy you look at, there will be a mixture. Some are forty and forty-two. My suspicion is that this is the oldest page in the book. Now, you see the pinholes?”
At the outside of every page, quite clearly once they have been pointed out, are the tiniest of punctures in the rag paper. “Go ahead, feel it,” Scheide said. “That’s where the pages were pinned down on the press. They pinned them right down on the press so they would’nt wiggle. Look, here’s another forty-line page.

Infinite riches [fragment]
uit: A gentle madness : bibliophiles, bibliomanes, and the eternal passion for books - Nicholas A. Basbanes


____