“He used it for his letters—and would have used it for his missal.”
“His letters and his missal. That’s the point.”
“The Bible isn’t his.” It wasn’t any bishop’s, any pope’s—but God’s. “Dietrich will have no choice,” Peter continued calmly. “When it is praised by cardinals and even by the kaiser, he will find he must embrace it.”
Then it was Heilant who fell mute, silenced by the truth of Gutenberg’s maneuver.
Peter watched the human tide surge by, some to the drinking ships, others to the gaming houses and the brothels, those ordinary workers seeking out their momentary joy. There but for God’s grace, he thought suddenly, go I.
“It cannot stay this way.” He rounded on the archbishop’s clerk. “You cannot hold the world—you cannot even hold the Bible now—in chains.”
The drink made Heilant’s mocking smile more venomous, no doubt, than he intended. “A moment’s crisis, that is all.” He shrugged. “You fail to see that all are lifted by the tide.”
“Your kind are lifted, but not mine.”
Heilant’s face tightened. “Providence decides.”
Peter smiled. “The proof has already arrived.”
“You always did think that you had some private pact with God,” the clerk said with an ugly look.
Of course. How could he not? How could he—Peter Schoeffer, shepherd’s son—have understood his own life otherwise? The world just opened, larger, ever larger, his life proceeding and unfurling year by year: from field to town, from classroom to academy to abbey, the walls of each succeeding room more open and expansive than the one that came before. Until at last he stood in this cathedral with his arms outstretched, holding this extraordinary book.
AFTERWORD
PETER SCHOEFFER went on to become the world’s first major printer, producing nearly three hundred volumes through the firm of Fust & Schoeffer, including the 1457 Mainz Psalter, widely considered the most beautiful book ever printed. Upon Fust’s death in 1466, Peter married his daughter, Christina, establishing a printing dynasty that spanned four generations. He invented the business of publishing and founded the event known today as the Frankfurt Book Fair, and died in 1503 at the ripe age of nearly eighty.
JOHANN GENSFLEISCH, known as Gutenberg, was immediately recognized as the inventor of printing with movable type. Though he never signed a single printed book, the success of the Biblia latina led to another Bible commission from the bishop of Bamberg and to Gutenberg’s appointment in 1465 to the court of the new archbishop of Mainz, Dietrich’s successor. Until his death in 1468, aged about seventy, he is thought to have produced many papal bulls, calendars, and letters of indulgence in consortium with printers including Heinrich Keffer and Berthold Ruppel. His last work was a new type for a religious encyclopedia, the Catholicon of Balbus, which it is believed other printers brought to press after his death.
JOHANN FUST prospered as a merchant and publisher, selling the wares of Fust & Schoeffer across western Europe after his partnership with Gutenberg was dissolved in November 1455. While showing a printed Bible in Paris in 1463, he was hounded out by scribes who accused the firm of undercutting normal prices. On a later business trip, he contracted the plague and died in Paris in 1466, aged about sixty-five. Several years later, Peter Schoeffer and Konrad Henkis, Grede’s second husband, donated a copy of the firm’s Letters of Jerome to the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris, which pledged to say a mass in perpetuity for Fust.
JAKOB FUST was killed in battle in 1462, when Mainz’s feuding factions descended definitively into civil war. As Bürgermeister (mayor) he had led the city council in a losing fight over Dietrich’s successor as archbishop. The victor, Adolph of Nassau, swiftly turned the once-free city into a vassal of the archdiocese, stripping the guilds of power and the council of its sovereignty. Many, including the three men who made the first printed Bible, lost homes and businesses. Nassau’s orders were eventually rescinded, and Gutenberg honored as a member of his court, while Fust and Schoeffer reestablished their press at the Haus zum Iseneck on the Brand.
JOHANNES TRITHEMIUS published accounts of his conversations with Peter Schoeffer in two chronicles, the Chronicon Sponheimense of circa 1500 and the Annales Hirsaugienses of circa 1514. His work De Laude Scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes) was printed in Mainz in 1494, presumably by Peter Schoeffer or his son Johann.
POPE NICHOLAS v died in March 1455, and with him any hope for Crusade against the Muslim Turks. No army was ever raised, despite the vehement exhortations of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the former secretary to Kaiser Friedrich III, who was named Pope Pius II in 1458.
The fall of Mainz pushed journeymen who trained in those two rival workshops out as refugees into the wider world. The craft of printing spread like wildfire: within a decade, it was being plied by Johann Mentelin and Heinrich Eggestein in Strassburg, Heinrich Keffer in Bamberg and then Basel, the Bechtermünzes in Eltville—then Johann Neumeister, Berthold Ruppel, Albrecht Pfister, Konrad Sweynheym, and others, the secret knowledge spreading from Germany to Italy and Switzerland and France. Printers set up shop in more than 250 cities between 1450 and 1500, a period known as the time of incunabula—the cradle years of printed books.
Forty-eight copies of the Gutenberg Bible still exist, complete or in part, out of the estimated 180 copies made. Some library collections generously cite the makers as “Gutenberg—Schoeffer—Fust?” Most do not. The last time one was auctioned, in 1987, a buyer paid $5.4 million for the Old Testament alone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel could not have been written without the help of experts whose scholarship and advice were crucial to my understanding of early printing. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Lotte Hellinga, former deputy keeper of the British Library, and Paul Needham, director of the Scheide Library at Princeton University, for their unflagging patience with my queries. Dr. Monika Estermann, editor of the Archive of the History of the Book [Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens] in Frankfurt shared invaluable insights, as did Dr. Wolfgang Dobras, director of the Mainz city archive, and Dr. Stephan Füssel, director of the Mainz Institute for Book Studies [Mainzer Institut für Buchwissenschaft] at the Johannes-Gutenberg University. Hearty thanks are also due to the staff of the Mainz Wissenschaftliches Stadtbibliotek and the librarians at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.
I have drawn on the painstaking research of eminent Gutenberg scholars over half a millennium, although the interpretation of the facts is my own. I relied heavily on Guy Bechtel’s magisterial 1992 study, Gutenberg: Une Enquete, and the art historical insights of Dr. Eberhard König, among others. A bibliography of sources and images can be found at www.gutenbergsapprentice.com.
For most of my life, I have been inspired by formidable masters of the typographic arts. I was fortunate to apprentice as a letterpress printer under the foreman of the former Mackenzie & Harris hot type foundry in San Francisco, the late Lester Lloyd, and to the proprietors of the Yolla Bolly Press in Covelo, California, the late James Robertson and Carolyn Robertson. This book is dedicated to those master printers, who left an indelible impression on me and led me directly to Johann Gutenberg and Peter Schoeffer. Peggy Gotthold and Lawrence Van Velzer of Foolscap Press offered support at every step, along with hand-printed materials for special editions of the novel. Close readers Vonnie Madigan, Katherine Maxfield, and the North London Writers Group contributed enormously, and I have been blessed with exceptional editors in Terry Karten and Marion Donaldson and fantastic agents in Simon Trewin, Dorian Karchmar, and Annemarie Blumenhagen. My mother, sister, and brothers championed this book from the start, but it is my husband and children I owe the deepest thanks, for their love and forbearance during my long trek through the medieval world. Vivat biblus.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALIX CHRISTIE is an author, journalist, and letterpress printer. She apprenticed to two master California printers and owns and operates a 1910 Chandler & Price letterpress. A widely published journ
alist, she turned to fiction in the 1990s, studying at St. Mary’s College of California, where she earned a masters of fine arts. She lives in London with her husband and two children. Gutenberg’s Apprentice is her first novel.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The title and text of this book are set in Historical Fell Type, a digital revival of one of the oldest book faces cut in England. It was designed by Peter de Walpergen, a Dutch punch-cutter, in the late seventeenth century for John Fell, the bishop of Oxford, and was one of the founding typefaces of the Oxford University Press. The initial capitals in main chapters are Linotype “Like Gutenberg Caps” from the Monotype company. The floriated initials in Sponheim Abbey chapters are facsimiles of illuminated initials in the Yale University Library copy of Johann Gutenberg’s last work, the Catholicon of Balbus.
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY MILAN BOZIC
COVER ILLUSTRATIONS: “GUTENBERGS ERSTER DRUCK,”
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © BY KIRSTIN MCKEE
COPYRIGHT
GUTENBERG’S APPRENTICE. Copyright © 2014 by Alix Christie. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Theophilus, excerpt from On Divers Arts, reprinted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc.
Woodcut on title page courtesy of Historisches Museum, Frankfurt; photographed by Horst Ziegenfusz
Coat of arms at the end of “Revelation” courtesy of Gutenberg-Museum, Mainz
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Christie, Alix.
Gutenberg’s apprentice : a novel / Alix Christie. –First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-06-233601-9 (hardcover) 1. Gutenberg, Johann, 1397?—1468—Fiction. 2. Printing—Germany—History—Fiction. 3. Printers—Fiction. I. Title.
EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN 9780062336033
PS3603.H7523G88 2014
813'.6—dc23
2014012878
14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Table of Contents
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
SPONHEIM ABBEY, GERMANY
GENESIS
CHAPTER 1: MAINZ, GERMANY
CHAPTER 2: MAINZ
CHAPTER 3: MAINZ
CHAPTER 4: SPONHEIM ABBEY
CHAPTER 5: MAINZ
CHAPTER 6: MAINZ
CHAPTER 7: MAINZ
CHAPTER 8: MAINZ
CHAPTER 9: MAINZ
CHAPTER 10: MAINZ
EXODUS
CHAPTER 1: CALCULATION
CHAPTER 2: COMPOSITION
CHAPTER 3: ALCHEMY
CHAPTER 4: BROTHERHOOD
CHAPTER 5: SPONHEIM ABBEY
CHAPTER 6: JOHANNESFIRE
CHAPTER 7: IMPRESSORIUM
CHAPTER 8: JOURNEYMEN
CHAPTER 9: WILDERNESS
CHAPTER 10: SPONHEIM ABBEY
NUMBERS
CHAPTER 1: RETRIBUTION
CHAPTER 2: APOTHEOSIS
CHAPTER 3: CRUSADE
CHAPTER 4: BITTER WATER
CHAPTER 5: ILLUMINATION
CHAPTER 6: APPARITIONS
CHAPTER 7: SPONHEIM ABBEY
CHAPTER 8: COVENANT
LETTERS
CHAPTER 1: SUNDAY BEFORE JOHN THE BAPTIST
CHAPTER 2: SPONHEIM ABBEY
CHAPTER 3: MONDAY BEFORE THE TRANSLATION OF SAINT BENEDICT
CHAPTER 4: SPONHEIM ABBEY
CHAPTER 5: FRIDAY AFTER THE TRANSLATION OF SAINT BENEDICT
CHAPTER 6: THURSDAY AFTER SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX
REVELATION
CHAPTER 1: TUESDAY BEFORE SAINT AUGUSTINE
CHAPTER 2: SPONHEIM ABBEY
CHAPTER 3: WEDNESDAY AFTER THE NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN
CHAPTER 4: SPONHEIM ABBEY
CHAPTER 5: WEDNESDAY AFTER THE NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Gutenberg's Apprentice Page 36