The University of Göttingen, in Germany, owns one of the world’s rarest books: an intact Gutenberg Bible. 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. 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. “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. The librarians placed the Bible on a desk and walked away. “It was not even secured!” he recalled.

Steidl was struck by the book’s durability: despite having been made in the fourteen-fifties, it looked almost new. Otherwise, he was disappointed. “I was really expecting that it was more industrially produced,” he said. “But it was all more or less handmade—the color was by hand, the drawing was by hand. The letters were used to print the text, but there were many variations. Let’s say it was interesting. 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.”

Despite 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. He has been pursuing his craft there ever since. “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. 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. 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. He also publishes literary books, among them the works of Günter Grass.

Steidl prides himself on being a canny businessman, but his admirers say that he is engaged in a loftier project than merely selling books. Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker

Steidl, who is sixty-six, is known for fanatical attention to detail, for superlative craftsmanship, and for embracing the best that technology has to offer. Edward Burtynsky, the Canadian photographer, who specializes in large-scale, painterly aerial images that show the impact of humans on the environment, said of Steidl’s operation, “It is like the haute couture of printing. He takes it to the _n_th degree.” Steidl seeks out the best inks, and pioneers new techniques for achieving exquisite reproductions. “He is so much better than anyone,” William Eggleston, the American color photographer, told me, when I met him recently in New York. Steidl has published Eggleston for a decade; two years ago, he produced an expanded, ten-volume, boxed edition of “The Democratic Forest,” the artist’s monumental 1989 work. Eggleston passed his hand through the air, in a stroking gesture. “Feel the pages of the books,” he said. “The ink is in relief. It is that thick.”

Artists who work with Steidl typically travel to Göttingen, which is about four miles west of the old border with East Germany. They wait, sometimes for years, to be summoned, and are expected to drop everything when he calls. “It is like going to kiss the Pope’s ring,” Mary Ellen Carroll, the conceptual artist, said. (In 2010, she published “MEC,”—a book of her work, divided into categories including Mistakes, Boredom, and Lies—with Steidl.) When artists arrive in Göttingen, Steidl is often not quite ready to give them his attention, and so they must while away entire days in a library four floors above the company printing press, which runs non-stop, seven days a week. Steidl does not want artists straying into town, or dawdling at a restaurant or a bar where he cannot find them. “He is like a monk,” Robert Polidori, whose work Steidl has published since 2001, says. “He is not a priest—he is there to work, but he doesn’t perform miracles, or sacraments. He delivers.”

Steidl can be brusque. “I have seen situations where grown men and women have cried,” Polidori says. A certain submission is required. Dayanita Singh, an artist who lives in New Delhi, has been publishing with Steidl since 2000. She told me, “Everything is done to keep you focussed on whatever you are doing. There is this utter concentration—nothing else that is going on in your life is relevant. It’s like if you went to a Vipassana retreat for ten days.” She added, “He might call you down at five in the morning and you could be stark naked, and he wouldn’t notice.”

Göttingen, which was barely touched by Allied bombs during the war, retains a Teutonic quaintness, with its many half-timbered buildings. Steidl’s factory is on a street in the center of town; next door, he owns a private guesthouse known as the Halftone Hotel, where his photographers stay while visiting. The compound is known familiarly as Steidlville, and his employees liken a stay there to entering a submarine: the door closes irrevocably behind you, and there is nothing to do but descend. The guesthouse is decorated with spartan luxury: there are narrow metal-frame beds, as in a dormitory, but the mattresses are excellent. Each room is named for an artist with whom Steidl has worked: one features Edward Ruscha prints; another has a plaque on the wall, a readymade that reads “Prof. Joseph Beuys Institut for Cosmetic Surgery / Specialty: Buttocklifting.” A third room has photographs by Karl Lagerfeld, the designer of Chanel. Steidl executes much of the fashion house’s printing and stages all of Lagerfeld’s exhibitions.

“Sundays we like to walk around being insufferable about our routine.” Facebook

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Three-course, spa-like lunches—lentil salad, vegetable soup, dates with yogurt, juice extracted from the apples that grow in the back yard of Steidl’s factory—are provided by an in-house chef, Rüdiger Schellong, in a dining room where a long table is set with flowers arranged in a vase of Lagerfeld’s design. Steidl’s place at the head of the table is indicated by a stack of cream-colored notecards, made to his specifications at a nineteenth-century paper mill on the west coast of Sweden. He uses notecards to annotate his conversations, and writes on them with Staedtler pens, which he keeps, lined up, in the breast pocket of the white lab coat he wears while working. All of Steidl’s choices are refined. “He has the best paper scissors on earth,” Singh told me. Steidl likes his clients to prepare for consultations by cutting up their own photographic proofs and gluing them into mockup layouts. It is not unusual to see world-renowned artists bent over the dining table, cutting and pasting like kindergartners.

Steidl lives around the corner from his factory. He prefers to sleep in his own bed, and he often arrives in New York City on the first flight in the morning, and leaves on the last flight the same day. To prepare for the opening of Chanel’s cruise collection last spring, which took place in Havana, Steidl flew from Germany to Cuba for the day, four Fridays in a row. On another occasion, after being honored at an early-evening award ceremony in London, he got on a plane to New York, arriving in time for another early-evening engagement—a screening of a documentary, “How to Make a Book with Steidl,” at the Museum of Modern Art. His artists like to say that he moves faster than jet lag.