Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker Steidl prides himself on being a canny businessman, but his admirers say that he is engaged in a loftier project than merely selling books. He also publishes literary books, among them the works of Günter Grass. His name appears on the spine of more than two hundred photography books a year, and he oversees the production of all of them personally. Among photographers and photography aficionados, Steidl’s name recognition equals that of Johannes Gutenberg: he is widely regarded as the best printer in the world. “I always say that the good spirit of the Bible, which is so nearby, brings a warm, creative wind here in my factory,” he said. He has been pursuing his craft there ever since. But I was not impressed.” As much as Steidl admired Gutenberg’s revolutionary contribution to the dissemination of knowledge, the Bible itself was “a baroque illustrated object that was absolutely not to my taste.”ĭespite his dissatisfaction with the handiwork of the father of printing, Steidl considers himself to be in the tradition of Gutenberg, and he appreciates the proximity of the relic to his own printing and publishing business, which he established in Göttingen in the late nineteen-sixties. The letters were used to print the text, but there were many variations. “But it was all more or less handmade-the color was by hand, the drawing was by hand. “I was really expecting that it was more industrially produced,” he said.

Steidl was struck by the book’s durability: despite having been made in the fourteen-fifties, it looked almost new. The librarians placed the Bible on a desk and walked away.

“I wanted to learn as much as possible about Gutenberg, who invented the movable letters for printing, and I wanted to see the first result,” he said recently.

Steidl, whose father worked as a cleaner in the presses of the local newspaper, had developed a precocious interest in the technical aspects of printing, and one day he asked the librarians if he might examine the book. When Gerhard Steidl, a printer and publisher of photography books, was growing up in Göttingen, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the book-one of only twenty surviving complete copies, and one of only four printed on vellum, rather than on paper-was sometimes on display at the university’s library. The University of Göttingen, in Germany, owns one of the world’s rarest books: an intact Gutenberg Bible.

Best printer for photographers 2017