The Mainz Psalter

Printed at Mainz on 14 August 1457 by Johann Fust and Peter Schoffer, this Psalter is the second substantial book printed in Europe with movable type, following Gutenberg's 42-line Bible by about two years, and it is the first printed book to name its printers, place and date in a colophon, and the first to carry initials printed in color rather than painted by hand. It exists because of a rupture: in November 1455 Fust successfully sued Gutenberg over unpaid loans, and the workshop that produced this book two years later was staffed in large part by Gutenberg's own former chief assistant, Peter Schoffer, who married Fust's daughter and testified against his old master in the same lawsuit that made the new partnership possible.

Ten copies of the 1457 edition survive, all on vellum, and this is one of the six short-issue copies made for general use rather than the four long-issue copies produced specifically for the diocese of Mainz. The Royal Collection's copy has a documented chain from the Monastery of St Ursula in Hildesheim, through the collector Friedrich Wilhelm von Duve and the University of Gottingen, to its presentation to King George III in 1800, and it has remained in the Royal Library at Windsor since, bound in purple velvet with the King's monogram. Its own two centuries in royal hands have been quiet: no exhibition drama, no near-loss, nothing beyond a well-kept book doing exactly what a royal library is for.

A working liturgical book, not a curiosity

This is the short-issue text of the Psalter that Johann Fust and Peter Schoffer printed at Mainz in August 1457: the Book of Psalms with the canticles, hymns, capitula and the greater and lesser preces used alongside them in the Divine Office. It is a large folio, printed on vellum in black and red, with the small initials printed in a second color and the large capitals printed in red and blue and then finished by hand. The Royal Collection's copy, bound, measures 323 by 438 by 75 millimetres.

It was made to be used, not admired: a book for singing and reading the Office from, at the scale a choir or a chapter could actually work with. That everyday liturgical purpose is the plainest and best-documented fact about it, and it is worth stating before anything else, because the object's fame as a printing landmark can make it easy to forget what it was actually for.

Second in Europe, first to say who made it

The Mainz Psalter followed Gutenberg's 42-line Bible by roughly two years and is generally reckoned the second substantial book printed in Europe with movable type. This archive already holds two copies of that Bible, the Doheny copy and the Vollbehr copy at the Library of Congress; both were produced under Gutenberg's own name and credit, and neither carries a printed statement of who made it, where, or when. This record is a different object, from a different, later print shop, under different printers' names, and it should not be confused with either.

What makes the Psalter a landmark in its own right is that it broke with the anonymity that governed manuscript production for centuries. A medieval scribe's colophon, where one exists at all, is typically a private aside; it was not standard practice to advertise, in the finished object itself, who had produced it and when. A printing press was a different kind of enterprise: a capital investment that needed future commissions, and a public statement of authorship and date was itself a form of advertising, proof that the workshop could deliver a book of this quality, on time, at scale. The Psalter's colophon is a business signature as much as a historical record.

The colophon

The printed colophon, abbreviated as it appears on the page, reads: 'Per Johannem Fust civem Maguntinum. Et Petrum Schoffer de Gernszheim. Anno domini Millesimo. cccc. lvii. In vigilia Assumpcionis.' In English: this volume of the Psalms, adorned with a magnificence of capital letters and clearly divided by rubrics, has been fashioned by a mechanical process of printing and producing characters, without use of a pen, and was completed for God's glory by Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoffer of Gernsheim, on the eve of the Assumption, in the year of Our Lord 1457, that is, 14 August.

The phrase worth pausing on is 'without use of a pen'. In 1457 that claim needed to be made explicit, because a reader could not otherwise be sure what they were holding. The book announces its own method of manufacture as the thing worth boasting about, which is a strange thing for a devotional book to do, and precisely the point: the Psalter is as much a demonstration of the press as it is a Psalter.

Two colors, printed, not painted

The large initials are printed, not hand-illuminated: red and blue ink applied to separately-inked type or blocks that interlock and were run through the press, usually together with the black-and-red text on the same sheet. Because both letterpress and the printing of the decorative blocks are relief processes, they could in principle share a single pass through the press, which is what modern accounts of the technique describe. The exact mechanical sequence, how the compositor achieved a clean boundary between two colors on a single small letterform without smearing, has not been fully reconstructed step by step by modern bibliographers; the general method is understood, the precise procedure is not settled.

The technique did not last. It was laborious, and later Fust-Schoffer books rarely attempt it again at this scale, which several sources read as the workshop concluding it was not worth repeating for the return it gave. That makes the Psalter not the beginning of a production method so much as its single, uneconomic high point: the most ambitious two-color printing job of the fifteenth century, tried once at full scale and then largely abandoned.

The rupture that made this book possible: Fust against Gutenberg

Fust was a Mainz burgher, a member of the Strasbourg goldsmiths' guild, and a financier. He advanced Gutenberg money twice, roughly 800 guilders in 1450 and a further 800 guilders in 1452, along with an annual sum for running costs, to fund what the surviving legal document calls the 'Work of the Books', generally understood to mean the 42-line Bible. On 6 November 1455, in the refectory of the Barefoot Friars at Mainz, Fust sued Gutenberg for the return of the money with interest, a total said to be around 2,020 to 2,026 guilders. The proceedings were recorded by the notary Ulrich Helmasperger and the document is known as the Helmasperger Instrument.

The suit was decided in Fust's favor. What exactly changed hands as a result is less clear than the outcome: the Instrument itself does not itemize which type, punches, presses or other equipment passed to Fust, only the money judgment. What is well attested elsewhere is that Fust went on to run a print shop with Peter Schoffer, previously Gutenberg's most senior workman, who had himself testified against Gutenberg in the same proceeding. Two years later that shop produced this Psalter.

Whose hand, whose type: an open question

This is the question this record was asked to weigh honestly, and the honest answer is that it is not settled. Between the November 1455 judgment and the Psalter's completion in August 1457, Fust and Schoffer designed and cut, or otherwise obtained, two sizes of a square gothic type distinct from the Bible type, and developed a genuinely difficult two-color initial printing process, all in under two years. Fust was a financier with no personal background in typefounding or presswork. Schoffer was a trained scribe and Gutenberg's former chief assistant, which gives him the most plausible personal claim to technical competence, but he had not run an independent shop before.

Set against that timeline is the fact, established above, that the primary legal record of the split does not specify what type or equipment Fust actually took control of. That silence is exactly why the question stays open: it leaves room to argue that some of the type or technical groundwork for the Psalter originated in Gutenberg's own workshop before the judgment, carried over involuntarily rather than invented fresh by Fust and Schoffer, and equally room to argue that Schoffer's documented skill was sufficient on its own. This record has not been able to verify, from sources it could directly examine, a named scholarly consensus on the point, only that the debate is real and that the primary document does not resolve it. Readers who want the specialist literature should start with the technical-imaging and type-comparison work associated with the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz and the British Library's incunabula scholarship, neither of which this record was able to consult directly.

A dynasty formed in the same year

Schoffer married Fust's only daughter, Christina, around the time the partnership was formed, which converted a business arrangement between a former employee and his old master's creditor into a family firm. The marriage mattered beyond sentiment: it is why, when Fust died in 1466, the workshop and its capital stayed inside one family rather than being dispersed, and why Fust and Schoffer's descendants remained in printing for three further generations. The Psalter of 1457 is the first product of that new family enterprise.

How many survive, and where

Ten copies of the 1457 Psalter are known to survive, all on vellum; no paper copy is recorded and it is not known whether one was ever printed. Two issues were produced: a long issue of 175 leaves, made specifically for liturgical use in the diocese of Mainz, of which four copies survive, and a shorter, more generally usable issue of 143 leaves, of which six copies survive, including the Royal Collection's. That makes the 1457 Psalter rarer than the Gutenberg Bible, of which roughly 49 copies or substantial fragments are known.

The surviving copies are held by the Berlin State Library, the Saxon State Library in Dresden, Darmstadt University Library, the Austrian National Library in Vienna (inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register for Austria in 2011), the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, the municipal library in Angers, the British Library in London, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, the Scheide Library at Princeton University, and the Royal Collection at Windsor.

From a Hildesheim convent to a king's library

Nothing is documented about this copy's whereabouts for roughly three centuries after it left the press. Its first recorded owner is the Monastery of St Ursula in Hildesheim; how or when the convent acquired it is not stated in the sources this record could verify. In 1758 the book was bought from the monastery by Friedrich Wilhelm von Duve (1707-1785). From von Duve's collection it passed, in 1782, to the University of Gottingen. Gottingen presented the volume to King George III in 1800, and the university was reimbursed 400 pounds for it in 1817. It has remained in the Royal Library at Windsor, within the Royal Collection, ever since.

That is a clean, well-documented chain from a German monastic library, through a private eighteenth-century collector and a university library, into the British royal library, but it is a quiet one. There is no rediscovery story here and no near-loss: a monastery sold a book it presumably no longer needed, a collector and then a university held it in turn, and a university made a royal gift. The drama, such as it is, belongs to the edition as a whole and to the 1455 lawsuit that made the print shop possible, not to this particular copy's own two and a half centuries of ownership.

Binding and condition

The Royal Collection's copy is bound in purple velvet, with gilt applique corner-pieces and a crowned monogram, GIIIR, George the Third Rex, at the center of each board: a binding made to mark the book's arrival in the royal library rather than one that traveled with it from Germany. The front board is lettered 'Psalmorum Codex Moguntiae Mcccclvii', Latin for 'Book of Psalms, Mainz, 1457', and the fore-edge carries floral clasps. Read against the 1800 presentation date, the binding is best understood as a contemporary royal commission to receive the gift, made in the last months of the eighteenth century, rather than an inherited German binding.

A quiet ownership since 1800

This record found no documented exhibition loan, theft, war damage, or recorded threat to this specific copy since it entered the Royal Collection. It has been digitized and appears in the Royal Collection's own online catalogue and in aggregator records such as Europeana and Google Arts and Culture, but nothing in the sources consulted describes it leaving Windsor, being lent, or being at risk. Where a record like this one usually earns its keep by surfacing a near-miss or a dispute, the honest finding here is that this copy's own two-hundred-and-twenty-five years in royal hands have been administratively uneventful. That is worth recording plainly rather than dressing up as more than it is.

What it was for

A psalter's function was liturgical, not decorative: the psalms, canticles and hymns needed for the Divine Office, laid out with rubrics, text printed in red, marking the instructions and feast-day cues a manuscript scribe would traditionally have picked out by hand. Printing those rubrics mechanically, in registered red ink rather than added afterward with a pen, was itself a claim that the press could reproduce a manuscript convention that mattered to the people using the book in choir, not merely imitate a manuscript's general appearance. The long issue, tailored specifically to the use of the diocese of Mainz, shows the workshop selling not just a generic devotional book but a liturgical edition matched to a specific institutional customer, which is early evidence of print being used as a commercial answer to an institution's actual liturgical requirements rather than a one-size-fits-all product.