Peter’s father too invoked the old adage: Once burned, twice shy. Why should he bear all of the risk while Gutenberg reaped the reward? No longer would he simply play the part of banker. He took an equal share in this, their common and uncommon venture. Fust pledged eight hundred guilders more, and they agreed to split, after expenses, the profits that accrued from what they called, a bit obscurely, to foil spies, das Werk der Bücher. The work of the books.
They’d rented the Hof zum Humbrecht from a goldsmith who had moved to Frankfurt. But he still had relations, looping strands of kin all over Mainz. The city was a web of eyes and ears, not just the metalworkers but the butchers, bakers, saddlers, and sawyers, and the keepers of the taverns serving members of those four-and-thirty guilds. Prayer alone would not keep their secret safe.
It was the third time in the master’s life he’d had to hide the work he did behind a smokescreen. In Strassburg he had hid away in an outlying farm, and he had done the same in 1448, when he returned to Mainz. Nobody even guessed for months that he was back, so well dug in was he among the fields by St. Viktor’s. But this time it was different, he said. They had to hide there in plain sight.
He brought the metal dies out to where Peter and his father stood, surveying the new press. “You’d better tell the guild,” he said to Fust, “that your new forge is set on making mirrors.” He wiped the stamps with a clean rag and glanced at Hans and grinned.
“Mirrors,” Fust said, slow to comprehend.
“Pilgrim mirrors. Hundreds of them, thousands.”
These were to cover up the purpose of the lead and tin, the bismuth and antimony, that entered through the cellar door. The Humbrechthof was flanked on one side by a shoemaker whose shingle hung just at the angle of the Quintinstrasse and the Cobblers’ Lane, and on the other by a house whose sole inhabitant was one old man whose relatives just waited for his death to pounce. For all the time they labored there, the printers came and went like rats along the alley behind the row of houses that ended in a cul-de-sac not fifty paces from the market square.
“The tinsmiths will cry foul,” said Peter.
“Not if you have a word with your upstanding brother.” Gutenberg looked hard at Fust. The merchant pursed his lips, eyes flicking back and forth between his partner and the dies.
“Two guilds,” he said. “The smiths and then the gold- and silversmiths, both wanting dues.”
The master raised his outspread hands, as if to ask if they had any choice. He looked acerbically at Fust. “You know as well as I that even silence has a price.”
To that almighty Book each man brought his specific knowledge, which he tipped into creation’s forge. If Gutenberg could grasp and shape the larger whole, then Peter and his father brought more focused skills. Which mines were best for tin and lead, and at what price, which farm the cleanest linseed, which buyers might take paper, and which vellum: all this Fust could provide. Which version of the text to use, which form and shape upon the page: to Peter’s great amazement, Gutenberg deferred to his own expertise in this. And it was that confidence, that unexpected faith in his own skill, that finally brought him back into himself. This was Peter’s place, his path: to hold these alabaster sheets once more between his hands and make of them a meaning.
The Bible had to be a lectern book, of course: large enough for monks to read in the refectory, yet still austere and within any abbot’s means. Reform meant modesty in every way. For buyers they were counting on those abbeys in the Bursfeld congregation, seventy at least. To start, though, they required a model they could copy. The master snorted at the tattered pocket Bible the Franciscans used that Peter had brought back from Paris. Nor was he impressed by Fust’s more ornate books of hours. They had to get their mitts, he said, on one of proper size. To Fust’s look of horror he responded with a barking laugh, “No, not to buy! I mean to steal one with my eyes.”
Instantly the volumes at St. Jakob’s sprang to Peter’s mind. “Brack has the testaments,” he said.
The master tapped his finger at his forehead. “As well announce our business by the crier.”
One might have thought it easy to put hands on a monumental Bible in a place like Mainz. She did not lack for churches or chapels. Yet in those days the only full texts of the Bible were in cloisters, not on pulpits. Here and there a parish had received one as a gift, but these were locked up in their sacristies. Fust’s uncles were both ranking clergy at St. Stephan’s; he would pretend some bookish errand. Peter meanwhile would approach the priest at St. Quintin’s. Before two days were out, though, Gutenberg had beaten both of them. He sauntered in with a huge parcel underneath one arm: the parish Bible of St. Christopher’s, as fat and bulbous as a little dog. “I’ve got the deacon, too, to help correct the pages.”
Fust blanched. “Nobody else.”
“It can’t be helped.”
There was a moment when their eyes locked and the air between them crackled. Then all three bent above that hard brown leather mound.
The master placed a horny thumbnail on a ruby line that marked the ending of one chapter. “A hundred, hundred twenty,” he said, his look somber. “A job enough to print the black.”
They debated for some time how to produce it. Fust said the buyers should receive the plain black printed sheets directly from the press, folded and collected into quires. They then could have them decorated as they pleased, as they would do with any product of the scribes. They’d hire someone to write the running titles on each page, and pen implicits and explicits and the other ruby lines that marked the sections of the text. In his experience, a duke preferred a different kind of painting to a merchant or to an abbot; each would hire a painter to illuminate the margins, and a binder who would sew and then encase the quires.
“You think of dukes?” the master asked.
Fust smiled. “Why not?” He paused then, looked at Gutenberg through narrowed eyes. “Everything depends upon the quality—and price.”
Gutenberg exhaled. His right hand rose, raked back his hair. “A bloody monster,” he said softly. “Twelve hundred pages, at the least—a hundred thousand pulls upon the bar.”
“If it can sell for less . . .” Fust did not finish.
Balefully, the printer stared down at that hidebound creature. “We’ll have to go like hell,” he said, “or else this beast will have the best of us.”
He taught Peter in that second winter that the art of making was the art of movement. In his relentless mind, all things were reduced to their pure motion. By his ripe age, he’d say, one ought to hope he’d learned a thing or two. The business of any business is stripping away—the cleaner and simpler the better, he would mutter, standing over Peter’s shoulder, watching as he carved and cast. Set your tools for every prospect and prepare: then clean the track and go like Satan’s hounds. “The men are not the vital thing—although I know it’s harsh.”
Though it seemed madness at the time, the master ordered them to add more characters to those they had already made. Scores more: in total they would need nearly 300 different letterforms. Each combination they could possibly conceive, five kinds of a, a half dozen u’s, exactly like those variations used by scribes. It had to look exactly like a Bible written out by hand, Fust said, or they would have no prayer of buyers. This way, as well, they’d have the letter that they needed at their fingertips each time. And then they’d have to cast scores more of every character, so they could set up three full pages at a time; each Bible page was twice the size of any missal.
To help them set them into lines, the master dreamed up little trays of wood for them to hold in their left palms, while their right fingers roamed the typecase to search out the letter. He had them switch from sand to clay inside the casting box, once he had seen how many letters they would need. Though clay too held for just one casting, it was far faster to prepare than sand.
They set the start of Saint Jerome’s prologue to the Bible in that dark, tight face that Peter had designed for their abo
rted missal. They laid it out in double columns in the strict proportions of the golden section: five thumbs across, eight down. The type made forty lines in two black towers down the page, with room between for vines, the curling tails of great initials. Gutenberg and Fust were more than pleased.
Then Peter did the reckoning. The first page they had set had taken fifteen hours.
“Thus can we judge,” the master said, “the weeks and months—”
“—and years—”
“—ahead.”
Quailing, Peter counted it once more. Sixty-six quires this Holy Book would make, approximately fourteen hundred pages.
“A quire a fortnight,” said the master, twisting at his beard.
Fust was more gimlet-eyed. “More like a quire each moon.”
Twelve quires a year were five years and a half. Dear Lord.
Protect us, in Thy wisdom; keep us from all harm.
Grede came once to the new workshop to “inspect all this commotion,” as she put it. It must have been late winter; Peter remembers her in furs. Her husband guided her around the letter cases, one hand planted firmly at her back. She brought to mind an otter, with the sleekness of her muskrat cape, her winter cap of fox. She moved as smoothly too, her fingers roving over parchment, pigments, pots of varnishes and resins. The men were struck entirely dumb. The master barely touched her outstretched hand, as if it burned. He made an awkward bow, retreated stiffly to his elevated table. Peter laughed inside, to see the way a woman could reduce their swagger to the rictus of such smiles.
She marveled at each piece of joinery, the punches and the letters that cascaded from the casting box. “Ingenious,” she murmured, staring fascinated at the press. She walked around it, eyeing it from every side. Konrad had built it sturdier this time, with tapered handles on the weighty carriage to preserve the pressman’s hands. It looked a little like a palanquin, she said, or else a bier. “Praise God, pray not,” Fust said and crossed himself. Death writhed beneath the gates and crept inside the city that whole year. In early Lent the plague had reappeared in livid spots and rattling coughs among the farmers first, then striking indiscriminately, highborn or low, not caring if its victims pushed a cart or rode a carriage. Veils covered the few faces on the streets; they shrank in doorways every time a stretcher passed, borne to the hospice of the Holy Ghost, returning laden with another corpse bound for the Kästrich graveyard. If fear of Gutenberg did not suffice to hold the men inside the shop at night, the stench and groans and terror of contagion did.
Grede ran her hands across the stacks of hides; she flicked and tested both the sizing and the weight of the new vellum. Even married, she was still a furrier’s daughter. For years she’d mended tears in manuscripts that Fust procured with tiny stitches to erase the blemishes. Now she raised one skin up to the light and tsked. The master watched, lips twitching, as she turned to Peter. “They ought to tan the man who did this. Another rubbing, don’t you think?” Behind her Peter saw the master frown and turn away. Gutenberg could never take a criticism from a man, much less a woman. Yet Grede was right. The calfskin could have used another pass.
No sooner had she gathered up her skirts and left than Keffer gave a hoot. “A young and juicy wife has brother Fust!”
“Retract your tongue, you clod.” Hans flung a hand toward the forge and screwed the magnifier back into his eye. The big smith was still grinning as he strolled away.
“Frau Fust, might I remind you, is a lady.” Gutenberg moved like a panther when he had a mind to. “As such we’ll have no leering and no lust—and by the saints, no bloody contact.” He looked at Peter then, thin lips drawn in a jaundiced smile. “Except for Peter, the poor sod. He hasn’t got the choice.”
Hans rolled his eyes but did not comment.
“You never had a mother, sir?” said Peter, smiling.
“We all slopped out of Eve. You know the good that brought.”
“Humanity, perhaps?” He said it teasingly.
Gutenberg gave a loud snort. “Woman!” he said. “‘More bitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare.’ Ecclesiastes.”
“‘Strength and beauty are her clothing, and she shall laugh in the latter day.’” Peter crossed his arms. “Proverbs.”
On even Ruppel’s stony face he caught a faint trace of amusement.
“Eve, Pandora, Magdalene. Go read your Greeks and scripture.” The master’s face was puckered as if he’d eaten something sour. “You mark my words, young man: a woman will destroy the best a man can be.”
He turned and walked, chin up, toward his desk. Peter watched that haughty, ramrod back. What had poor woman done, to be so calumnied? Strange way he had of showing Christian love. Peter thought of Grede, and Fust’s first wife, Elisabeth, and Céline who sold her father’s paintings by the Seine—each just as quick of hand and eye as any man. The early guilds were filled with women—weavers, painters, carvers, even. Everywhere—from Bruges to Louvain, Venice, Paris. What had she done, to man and more particularly to Gutenberg, to make her such an object of his hate? Peter glanced at Hans. Another mystery that one day, after several pints, he would extract from the old man.
CHAPTER 2
COMPOSITION
March–May 1452
IT WAS DARK when Peter stepped into the workshop every morning, dark each evening when he left. He wondered sometimes if the day had ever even been. While Keffer and the master cast, he and Hans practiced setting type. Each typecase was a slanted wooden labyrinth he had to look at first to find the letter he required. But bit by bit the lay of those three hundred pockets graved their places in his mind. The pages they were using as their manuscript were clipped onto a stand before his eyes. He and Hans would sound the letters as they groped, and Peter’s heart was glad at that low mumbling hum that he had missed from the scriptorium.
There was an art to it, he found to his surprise; it was not rote, as he had once believed. His right hand held each option in its grasp, as with his pen. He chose which of the different forms to use, which ligature to shorten or expand a word. Each line required a certain spacing to achieve a perfect weight: he’d set some lines, then have them proofed, then move a space, exchange a letterform, and proof and look again. It troubled him, at first, to think that in this way he might achieve a perfect line. Was man not flawed, by definition? And who was Peter to imagine they might reach for more? And yet the lines, when he composed them, were magnificently balanced. This, too, in his own mind, a proof of God’s intention, and the holy mission they fulfilled.
Above all he found unexpected joy in working hand in hand among those craftsmen. He’d never worked that way before: for all that scribes worked side by side, their lines were singularly theirs. But in the Humbrechthof, he found himself a link in a much larger chain. He’d carry his full tray to the composing stone, and hold the lines as Keffer tied the forme. Then Keffer in his turn would heft it toward Ruppel at the press; they’d ink it, pull the proof, and pass it back to Peter. They did not banter much; there was no need. There was a pleasure and a rhythm in the work itself that took the place of words.
It struck him only afterward that this was Gutenberg’s most lasting gift. The man had faith—and fire and ruthless expectation—that they would bring to it the best they had. This faith was harsh, demanding, unrelenting, and it pushed them far beyond themselves. He worked beside them much of that first year, no better and no worse, their work implicitly a piece with his own brilliance. If afterward they were appalled at how he viewed them, there was a kind of fairness in that cold assessment: all men were equal before Gutenberg, and God.
Peter did not know then just how precious were those weeks and months. It felt as though they tossed a rope ahead and hauled the whole thing sweating forward. Sometimes he fancied he could see the very operation in the smolder of the master’s eyes: fixed on some distant spot, Gutenberg would cast his thought out far before him, straining toward the spot where it would land. For once Peter dared to hope that his own stubborn
striving too might finally be recognized—not mocked, as it so often had been in his life.
That hope was answered suddenly one day in early May. He was sitting, staring at the shape of those two columns on the page. He thought he knew the skills he had, his limits—when to his amazement he was gifted with a vision that exceeded, and by far, his own mind’s reach.
The frayed edge of both those right-hand margins had disturbed him from the start. They were uneven: some lines ended short and others were too long, and broken by a hyphen. A sloppy, ragged edge was the result. He was staring, irritated, at it when suddenly he saw: in one swift stroke the hand of God just pushed the birdlike scratches of the punctuation to the right, leaving a crisp and perfect margin. Peter saw how easy it would be. A miracle, indeed—of pure mechanics.
Excitedly he went to Ruppel. Build me a wider type-stick, man, he said, an m’s width broader than our column. Ruppel scratched his head, but did it. Peter set a dozen lines in something like a frenzy, lining each precisely up to end at the same spot. When necessary he dropped a hyphen or a stop into the extra space beyond the margin. He took the tray back to the press and waited for the inking and the grinding and the proof. And then he knew.
It was perfect. Absolutely perfect: more exquisite than the dream of any scribe. The block was sharp, perfectly squared: the punctuation floated softly in the margin, brushing like the lashes of a bashful bride.
Until that day, his father had just seen the press as a much faster set of hands. The master, for his part, was driven by a vision of that never-ending replication, making many from the one. That evening, when he showed them both, they grasped that this was much, much more.
Gutenberg's Apprentice Page 13