#21: The Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455)
Johann Gutenberg’s Bible was the first major book printed with movable type in Europe, making it technically a printed rather than handwritten document. Yet the distinction barely matters: surviving copies are so rare, so sacred to the history of the written word, and so heavily annotated by hand that they occupy the same cultural space as manuscripts. The last complete copy to sell at auction fetched $5.4 million in 1987, a figure that would be unrecognizable today.
