Three Gutenberg Bibles on display in NYC

The Morgan Library & Museum in New York is displaying three rare Gutenberg Bibles simultaneously -- an unusual opportunity to see different versions of the 15th Century books, which are famous as the first books printed in the West, and also as the first printed from movable type. An explanation from the Morgan:

"The invention of printing is commonly credited to Johann Gutenberg, who developed the technique of casting metal types and composing them letter by letter, line-by-line, to produce pages ready for the press, where they could be inked and printed on sheets of paper or vellum. To exploit this invention, he set up one, possibly two, workshops in Mainz, Germany, and raised a considerable sum of money for the production of the Bible, which was completed around 1455. Bibliographers believe that Gutenberg and his successors printed between 120 and 135 copies of the Bible on paper and between 40 and 45 copies on vellum, of which nearly 50 copies survive, not all in good condition. A complete copy contains the Latin Vulgate text of the Bible in 1,282 pages, usually bound in two stout volumes."

I had a chance to visit recently, and spoke with a curator, John Bidwell (a Cotuit native!) about the significance of the Bibles. Here's a brief video, with pix: