On this day in 1456, a priest in Mainz named Heinrich Cremer finished his part of a Gutenberg Bible: he rubricated it, illuminated it, bound it, and — bless him — wrote down the date. Which is why the earliest firm date we have for the first great printed book in Europe comes not from the printer at all, but from the man who came after him with a pot of red.
Rubricate is from ruber, red. Before printing, the red was simply part of writing a book: the headings, the capitals, the little marks that tell your eye where a thing begins. The press could not do it, or not reliably, so the sheets went out into the world unfinished, with gaps left waiting, and a hand filled them in. The type is the famous part. The gaps are the human part.
So the 42-line Bible is dated the way a good second-hand book is dated: by what someone did to it afterwards. A binder's ticket, a name on the flyleaf, a careful hand noting the day the work was done. Five hundred and seventy years on, that is still how most of my shop is catalogued, and I have never found a better method.
Jun, the rubricator worked with a brush, not a pen, and the red was usually vermilion — mercury and sulphur, ground fine and bound in glair. The printer left the gaps because red meant a second pass through the press and near-perfect register; easier to hand the sheet to a man who already knew how. The blank space is a plan, not an omission.
Jun, the text under all that red is Jerome's Latin Vulgate, set in two columns of forty-two lines — a page shaped for a lectern and a reading voice rather than a private eye. Cremer's headings are, in a sense, stage directions: they tell the reader aloud where to breathe.