Do you have a Bible? Did someone give it to you—or did you buy it yourself?

How much do you think a Bible costs?

1. About as much as lunch for your family at McDonald’s?
2. About as much as a car?
3. About as much as a camera or an iPod?
4. About as much as a candy bar?

Most families did not have Bibles about 600 years ago. They cost too much money. That meant most people never read the Bible.

Long ago, books were copied by hand—page by page! It took hours and hours to copy the whole Bible.

Your dad or your mom would have had to work for a whole year to earn enough money to buy a Bible in those days.

People listened to preachers. That was the only way to learn what God said in the Bible.

That made Johannes Gutenberg unhappy. Johannes was a printer. He lived in Mainz, Germany. He was also a goldsmith. He worked with jewelry and dainty metal objects.

Johannes wanted people to have their own Bibles. He thought and thought. Why did Bibles have to cost so much?

Printers in Johannes’ day used blocks of wood. They were something like giant rubber stamps. Careful craftsmen carved letters into pieces of wood the size of a whole page. What if they slipped and made a mistake? They had to start over with a new block of wood.

Each page took days of work.