How many copies of the Gutenberg Bible were printed?

How to get close to this number

Think about what a first print run could possibly be. The press was new, the paper and vellum were expensive, the type had to be cast by hand, and the market was a small number of wealthy institutions. A run in the hundreds is the most a workshop of that era could produce and sell — thousands would have been both impossible to make and impossible to shift.

The instinct to guess high comes from associating printing with mass production. It became that eventually, but the first books were luxury objects competing with manuscripts, priced accordingly and produced in small quantities. The revolution was in the cost per copy at scale, and scale took decades to arrive; the first run itself was modest.

The comparison in the explanation is the one that matters: a scribe took about a year per Bible, and the press did the same work in a day. That ratio is the entire significance of the invention. Note too that the survival figure is remarkable in its own right — a substantial fraction of a print run from the 1450s still exists, because these were valuable objects that institutions kept.