As one of the most important landmarks in the history of the book in the West, the Gutenberg Bible has been the subject of many studies, from ca. 1700 onwards, as Eric White demonstrates in his book Editio princeps. By writing a history of the Gutenberg Bible as a collectable object based on its historiography, White offers a new and original approach to what has become known as the first printed book.

After a short preface and acknowledgements, White skips the introduction and takes his readers straight to fifteenth-century Mainz and the history of Europe's first printer and to the printing of the Gutenberg Bible in the first two chapters of his book. In the third chapter, he offers a brief historiography of the Gutenberg Bible and closes part 1 by dividing the history of the Gutenberg Bible into three phases: its enormously important integration into fifteenth-century culture, its complete fall into oblivion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its rehabilitation and canonization from the eighteenth century onwards.

The second part of the book discusses the Gutenberg Bible as an object of historical inquiry, which is the main focus of Editio princeps. Here, White describes the history of each extant copy from the moment it was rediscovered and recorded in (bibliographical) literature, scholarly correspondence, or a sales catalogue. Starting with the rediscovery of the copy now in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz, around 1700, White works his way up to the twenty-first century, with the actual discovery of a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible in 2017, used as a wrapper for Johann Tungerlarius's Analysis Logico-Theologica Omnium Epistolarum Dominicalium, parts 1 and 2 (1616 and 1622), at the Staats- und Stadtbibliothek in Augsburg. Part 3 of White's book is a census of Gutenberg Bibles based on Paul Needham's 1985 census, but revised and expanded, also including fragments. It contains information on location, references, size, completeness, different settings, and provenance of all known copies.

With his Editio princeps, White offers a wealth of new information, but most importantly, he offers a new and original approach to Gutenberg's monument in printing history, which particularly manifests itself in the second part of the book. There he adds a new layer to our understanding of the Gutenberg Bible and its extant copies by giving insight into the Gutenberg Bible as phenomenon through its historiography. Given the vast amount of literature and possible references to copies, this must have been an enormous undertaking.

However, White's approach also creates confusion because it is not always clear what the Gutenberg Bible actually is. Is it a construct that only emerged after 1700, as White describes in part 2? Is it the Bible edition that came into being in Mainz around 1450 (part 1)? Or does it refer to actual copies of this edition (part 3)? This matters, especially for the theory of the Gutenberg Bible falling into oblivion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. White describes one long history, connecting the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, but these are different histories. The fifteenth century saw the birth of a printed bible by Gutenberg in Mainz, while the eighteenth century saw the birth of the construct that is the Gutenberg Bible. Although the Gutenberg Bible as construct didn't exist yet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, copies of it were being bought, donated, read, and used. The sources for this history are the copies themselves, with their annotations and owners’ inscriptions, information that is given in the census in the third part of the book. Obviously, White's approach clearly treats the Gutenberg Bible as construct, but Editio princeps would have benefited from a more methodological introduction giving insight into White's thinking.

That being said, White offers an original and interesting history of one of the world's most famous books. It is his approach that sets Editio princeps apart from many other books on the Gutenberg Bible—or any other book on incunabula, for that matter.