The Red and Blue Letters from the Psalms

Initial test print of the Psalms from Gutenberg Bible in English by Reproduction Bibles.

Outside, the dogs of war inflicted the ugliness of mayhem, fear and terror upon those, who wanted to live peaceful and productive lives. When bishops fought for the rights to a bishopric, bloodshed followed.  Such were the days in Mainz when Johann Gutenberg had engaged in the relentless pursuit of perfection of the moveable type, ink embedded with varnish, and the printing press that would produce the most beautiful printed book in the world, the Gutenberg Bible.

Within its pages is the cultural carry over from the earlier middle ages, especially in the Psalms of King David. Each sentence begins with a red or blue letter, and when the page is looked upon, there is the tantalizing mystery of beauty of the text of the medieval Bible.

And, this is where we are in the development of our tribute to Johann Gutenberg and the medieval Bible. We are slowly, carefully, inserting over a thousand custom designed letters developed in FontLab Studio into the text of the psalms in order to as faithfully as possible replicate the look and feel of these pages. The work is slow, tedious, and frankly - not that exciting. But, it has to be done in order to get this right. We developed these letters for the Psalms in FontLab Studio over a year ago, and for anyone, who knows how to develop fonts based on historic work, that alone is a quite type consuming and exacting task. 

Earlier on, we ran into some speed bumps along the way in our production of the Gutenberg Bible in English. A missing 200 word prologue set us back, but that was resolved thus enabling us to have in hand - finally - the entire text of the medieval Bible from Genesis to Revelation - all of the prologues, prefaces, and arguments in the order in which they appear in the Gutenberg Bible … in English. We suspect that this is a first.

We are near the finish line. And, we suspect that this is why snails appear in the borders of so many manuscripts of the psalms from the middle ages. These books take a long time to produce. 

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