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Rh had been mortgaged to, one of the many ecclesiastical bodies of that town. There is evidence that Gutenberg frequently borrowed money from wealthy monasteries. The imperfect workmanship of the first section is, apparently, the work of a printer in the beginning of his practice, when he had not discovered all the tools and implements which he afterward used with so much success.

The Bible of 36 lines should have been in press a long time, for it cannot be supposed that Gutenberg had the means to do this work with regularity. His office was destitute of composing sticks and rules, iron chases, galleys, and imposing stones. Deprived of these and other labor-saving tools, without the expertness acquired by practice, frequently delayed by the corrections of the reader, the failures of the type-founder and the errors of pressmen, it is not probable that the compositor perfected more than one page a day. He may have done less. Even if, as Madden supposes, two or more compositors were engaged on this, as they were upon other early work, the Bible of 36 lines should have been in press about three years.

The newness of the types seems to favor the opinion that this must be the earlier edition. The same types, or types cast from the same matrices, were frequently used in little books printed between the years 1451 and 1462, but they always appear with worn and blunted faces, as if they had