Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel

by Alix Christie

  The clergy stood in dark and splendid rows along the cloisters of Archbishop Dietrich’s Little Court, fur-collared, hung with crimson stoles, the autumn sunlight winking from their jewels. Peter spied Petrus Heilant jammed among the canon regulars of St. Viktor’s. There was a grim set to the scribe’s slack jowls and to the jaws of all his fellows, at the thought that they might lose all they had managed to obtain. Well then, thought Peter, smiling to himself: let the bloodletting start.

  It all came down to money, as Jakob and Johann Fust always said. More trade was done inside the church than at the Frankfurt fair. How loudly all those clergymen proclaimed their poverty, his father said, bitterly complaining of extortion at the hands of Rome. Fust’s uncles, in their pulpits, screeched in that same choir. And yet the working folk knew otherwise: the world was eaten from within, the abbeys stripped by noble monks and nuns who clawed the riches to themselves, the city clergy fat and bold, resisting tithes to Rome, then issuing indulgences and pocketing the proceeds. Nicolas the Fifth had sent his envoy to root out that rot and curb their greed.

  Archbishop Dietrich had not deigned to show his face. It sickened Peter. How few of them were humble and devoted to the Word. He searched among the crowd for Prior Brack, but could not see him. The Benedictine seemed an ascetic man, unmoved by worldly pomp and power. Scoured by that same dry wind that had cleansed Saint Benedict, the founder of their order, whom God a thousand years before had ordered to preserve His Word. It was this same wind Peter felt, with growing strength, guiding his hand. He watched the bright red beam of Cardinal Cusanus move with purpose through the throng and knew there’d never be a place for him among those grasping prelates, in their cloisters and their chancelleries, estranged from God’s true flock.

  The people stretched their arms and clamored. Gutenberg turned toward him, raised his hands, and mimed a prayer. Deliver us, approve the book—and while you’re at it, sweep the stables clean. Only later did they realize that in the sweeping and the breaking that Cusanus undertook, the minor battle of St. Jakob’s missal was the last thing on his mind.

  Three weeks remained until the formal meeting of the synod. The cardinal took residence at Guldenshaff’s, around the corner from the workshop, passing his days down at the Charterhouse in writing and in meditation. Peter found it an exquisite torture knowing that he breathed that self-same air and walked those self-same streets: as great a star as Germany had given to the world, a common man who’d risen to the pope’s right hand.

  Cusanus was a scholar, though a boatwright’s son from Kues on the Mosel. He saw the Lord’s hand in all matters, large and small: the movements of the stars, the workings of the earth, even the properties of elements, including metals. Peter found himself rereading all his writings. Cusanus preached each man’s capacity to feel God’s touch, regardless of his birth, his wealth, even his creed. Man was himself a pilgrim mirror, catching and reflecting back the rays of God’s own essence. He could not know, of course, his own Creator, as an owl could never look into the sun. Yet he alone received the gift to fashion his own world with mind and hand—and with that gift he might approach that divine spark through small creations of his own.

  Peter knew this spark—he’d felt it in the making of his metal letters. But such ideas angered the established clergy, convinced that they were God’s exclusive representatives on earth.

  Most mornings through those long, excruciating weeks he waited, poised in the small doorway that gave out onto the Cobbler’s Lane, hoping for a glimpse of that tall crimson figure dashing past. Of all the men who walked the earth, it seemed to Peter, Nicholas Cusanus would perceive their letters for the miracle they were. Cusanus laid great stress on learning, and predicted ever-swelling shelves of books—as if he knew what God had granted Gutenberg. Peter kept a printed sheet of the Our Father rolled up in a pocket, praying for a sign that he should show it. But no sign came: he could not break his vow of silence.

  They all felt great relief when finally the synod started. Master Gutenberg attended daily, as if going to some cheap entertainment. Each evening he regaled them with the scene. Dietrich in his golden robes “like Pharaoh” had appeared at last, surrounded by his staff; across from him “your cardinal,” the master cracked at Peter, “encircled by his band of crows.” The archbishop was livid from the start, but he couldn’t let it show. King Friedrich, “that Hapsburg whelp that Dietrich put upon the throne,” had ordered the archbishop to Ferrara for his coronation as the kaiser in that very week. But Dietrich wasn’t leaving the archbishopric of Mainz, not while that upstart cardinal swept through with sharpened knife. The master laughed again. The proclamation of the orders for reform took up the whole first day, and chilled and darkened the archbishop’s people like a sudden, brutal downpour.

  The master kept his finger on the pulse of it, and on the margins tried to wheedle those of rank to speed the cardinal’s decision on their missal. The rest of that long meeting, though, was much too tiresome for words. There was haggling over tithes and taxes, who got which commission or the naming rights for vacant parishes, a grim and bloody battle over who could issue letters of indulgence. Cusanus took this latter deadly seriously, and accused the bishops of a tawdry traffic in redemption that besmirched the pope. A letter of indulgence was a sacred grant made by His Holiness, and its integrity must be respected. He calumnied them as well for trafficking in relics, and for promulgating more new holy days that only meant more offerings in their own salvers. Only when the session dealt with blood and women did things liven up, the master said, grinning. There’d be no rites around some sainted smear that just as easily could be a gutted goat—“or even, God forbid, the mess of Eve.

  “You ought to see the way they clutch themselves, those monks, to hear their concubinage condemned,” he added, chortling. “It seems they take their members for their vows, and go so far as to propitiate them in their abbeys!”

  And then as loudly as it started, it was over. The clergy beat their great black wings and raised the dust with their departure—just like the merchants at the Frankfurt fair, leaving nothing but their rubbish and soiled sheets. By then it was December. Cardinal Cusanus left their city on the seventh day of that last month in the year of our Lord 1451, bound for parleys between England, France, and Luxembourg—the matter of the missal of St. Jakob’s clearly unimportant in those state affairs.

  The days were at their darkest of the year. Johann Fust wore that same darkness on his brow. They had been commissioned to produce a book that clearly would not be forthcoming. Everything he had invested was tied up in useless piles of paper, wood, and metal. Halfway through the month, he called Gutenberg and Peter to decide what they should do.

  Fust’s back was to the fire. His arms were crossed and his head hung heavy to one side. Gutenberg sat slumped on the wood settle, face in shadow, with Peter between them at the battered table. The type was made. The crew was trained. They were like actors in a passion play, just waiting for the tarp to rise. For a very long time there was no sound beyond the popping of the flames. Down the street at the great houses, merriments abounded: madrigals and jugglers and feasts. Yet in the Hof zum Gutenberg all was somber and still.

  The master stirred first, speaking as if continuing a conversation begun some time before. “But to proceed would be folly.”

  “As it was folly to trust a text that was not final.”

  Johann Fust breathed heavily and settled in a chair. Disappointment etched the corners of his mouth. He had believed—had relied heavily—on the judgment of Johann Gutenberg. “Is there no way,” he asked, “to gauge Cusanus’s interest?”

  “His interest is the same as ours. At least, I thought our work could serve his ends.”

  Gutenberg sat caved in, hardly moving. To Peter he looked just as he had looked up on the mount below the Jakobsberg, a man who turned in ever-tighter circles, proffering a gift that others spurned. The master roused himself and started speaking bitterly. “Apparently he’s influenced by
Hagen.” Fust frowned. “The leader of their bloody congregation. They think that Prior Brack has gone too far.”

  “You never said a word about another version.” The tone of Fust’s voice was accusing.

  “How in the hell was I to know?” The master scowled, and curled more deeply in himself.

  “Cusanus will support that text, then, and not ours.”

  “No doubt.”

  They lapsed back into silence.

  “No point in trying to print the other, I suppose,” said Fust.

  “Forget the cursed missal.” The master’s growl was almost animal.

  If Brack’s text wasn’t chosen, Peter thought, the monks would never know how they had planned to make it. Those who prevailed would copy out the winning text by hand, as they had done for centuries before. And in the Hof zum Gutenberg the three of them would still be sitting looking at each other as they sat here now—the money sunk into ten thousand hunks of lead for which they had no use, no project.

  “Is there not . . .” Fust broke off and raised his eyes toward the heavens. “Did the cardinal not say he wanted something else? A psalter, maybe, or a breviary?”

  Gutenberg looked up then too, as if the answer were inscribed in the thick beams. The Bursfeld Benedictines had petitioned Rome for years for the permission to enact reforms. He’d told the whole crew so when he’d proposed that missal, months before.

  “The standard texts,” he said. “To wipe out variation, incorrect interpretation.”

  “There must be something else, then, we can standardize.”

  The fire sputtered as they strained their minds.

  “They’re meant to unify all practices,” the master said.

  “Each mired in some arcane dispute.”

  The master sighed and nodded. He hauled himself up to his feet and leaned against the chimney, staring into the fire. “It has to be something they can’t claim. Like the Donatus. Something in the domain of the public, not the church.”

  Fust stroked his chin. The walls pulled in, and it seemed hotter as they bent their minds in thought—as if they stoked them, as a furnace sucks the air in to intensify the flames. “Something over which no church or prince can exercise control.” Peter’s father spoke in a low and meditative voice. “What else did he tell them to review?”

  Johann Fust asked it; Johann Gutenberg replied.

  “The Holy Gospels.”

  They stared at one another in shocked silence.

  “Each abbot was to do his best to get a copy of the Holy Book, as free from error as the hand of man can make it.”

  And still they only looked at one another. Gutenberg for once was shorn of words.

  “It would not just be used by those two dioceses,” his father said.

  “But the whole Latin world.” The master closed his mouth and folded his long hands beneath his nose. “A massive market.”

  “The Bible,” Fust echoed, thunderstruck. A flock of hopes and fears went spinning through each heart.

  The master’s eyes had kindled into blazing light. “Undoubtedly they think they own it. But it springs from a higher source.”

  Amazement filled them then—and yet at the same time an utter calm. Peter rose, his mouth half open. He could feel, quite instantly, the way it fell upon them like a blessing—so purely, in so straight and bright a beam, that each could only cross himself, and bow his head and offer up his thanks to God.

  In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

  These were the words that brought a new world into being.

  Peter set them flush against a nothingness; hard against a nonexistent margin he arranged them, floating like the world itself in the great void.

  In the beginning God created heaven, and earth.

  If the pope, the cardinal, the prior, could not give Gutenberg a text to print, then they would choose and print their own.

  This, then, was their true beginning: bitter winter, creeping blue-toed to the ashes, blowing heat out of the humped-up coals. Peter set those first words purely for himself, in the frozen heart of the year when the reaper stalks, culling the weak and sick.

  He hung them like a lodestar just above the forge, to remind them of the spark that springs from the Creator, running kindling down the ages straight to us. He set that sentence flush against His boundless grace and inked it with the black of space. And then he pressed its darkened lips on skin and hung it just above his eyes, and knew that this, too, was a kind of genesis.

  EXODUS

  CHAPTER 1

  CALCULATION

  February 1452

  THE PICTURE Peter carries in his head is that of Moses, dark hair streaming as he parts the waters, urging on the tribes. Gutenberg resembled him remarkably that hopeful spring. The master stood apart, his arms outstretched, scooping toward them every kind of good this monumental Bible would require. Peter had to laugh at the way he windmilled his long arms, directing the whole stream into the chute that fed the workshop. “You look just like an abbot at his busy hive.”

  “You could do worse than watch Cistercians.” Gutenberg pulled at his beard and smiled.

  There was no question of remaining in the Hof zum Gutenberg. They grasped the magnitude this time. Conservatively reckoning, the Bible ran a thousand pages, if not more—five times as long as their aborted missal, forty times the size of the Donatus. That Fust and Gutenberg even entertained the thought revealed how much their backs were to the wall.

  They were inspired, enraptured certainly—convinced of their invincibility, thought Peter afterward. This was pure Gutenberg, of course. But on the other hand they didn’t have much choice. The Bible was the only book they could hope to sell in quantity that did not need approval from the church, so long as they adhered to the accepted version. Yet from the start it was a risk in every way—not least the certainty that Dietrich would look askance at laymen operating outside his control. If any of the clergy were to learn of it, they had no doubt Dietrich would swoop in and shut them down.

  Their crew then numbered only four—Peter, Hans, Keffer, and Ruppel—and yet the premises the partners looked at were all cavernous and freezing: a granary, more stables, sculleries, the ground floor of a house in town. They settled on the last, a massive dwelling girded by a thick high wall a street away along the Cobblers’ Lane. The press would have to stay behind: it was impossible, the master said, to take it all apart and lug it piece by piece along the street. There was no darkness deep enough to trust, no way to stop prying ears and eyes.

  “Once burned, twice shy.” He winked at Hans. “The last time I was fool enough to let my tools out of my sight, we came much closer than a Christian should to robbing graves.” Peter glanced up, amazed. What darkness did he hide? The apprentice tucked that scrap away and vowed to worm it out of Hans.

  They left the wood press standing where it was and moved the rest one moonless night across the churchyard of St. Christopher’s, through a gate left almost imperceptibly ajar. The master’s pastor, clearly, was informed. From that black chink between two walls it was no more than a cat’s spring across the street that climbed to St. Quintin’s, into a gloomy courtyard, then to the low door of the Hof zum Humbrecht, its upper stories disappearing in the blackness of the night.

  Four steps dropped to the battered earth of a ground floor. Joists the width and girth of a small horse held up the cobwebbed rafters stretching deep into the subfloor of the house. The clay gave off a smell of roots and piss and rats. Chest by bench by bucket, tray by case, they hauled the workshop in. They didn’t smuggle only casting boxes, inks and ores and heavy crates of metal type. They had a giant bellows, too, rigged to a treadle, which any fool would know was meant to fan a forge.

  Hans and Keffer fit the forge pipe in the chimney stones; Peter and big Ruppel set two casting stations up, and pried the shutters open to scour out the stench. The place was huge and had a space for every need: the longer, narrow halls for drying; the cavern with the forge where they would cast and
run the press; a separate room where they could sit and put their letters into lines. The shapes below were echoes of the rooms in which the men would live just overhead. The master sent for Konrad, back in Strassburg, to build a new press; he would not hire some local cretin who might blab. While waiting they removed the walls that separated room from room in that dim underworld. When it was done, no corner remained safe from his keen eyes, the ceiling held by a stripped forest of dark beams. “The key is speed,” the master said, “efficiency, by God. No wasted step or motion.” It seemed to Peter as he watched him pacing, barking orders left and right, that Gutenberg saw everything from a great height, his raptor eyes pinned to the slightest movement on the ground.

  He sent across the city, then the river and the forests and the mountains, for materials. Paper from a mill in Piedmont, vellum out of Swabia, to supplement the stack they had. Ruppel went with him to the Wood Gate to inspect the hardwoods: maple and beech for benches, cases, tables. He commanded coal and candles, ores and oxides. He was a muleteer, he cracked, a blooming drover. Whip-cracker, jack of all trades: polisher of stones, mixer of metal, deviser of devices, maker of machines.

  Peter pitched in with his hammer like the rest. Gone was the little brownish lump from writing on his middle finger and the trace of burn on his left hand. He built the letter cases at a slant, then hefted his own letters, thick and heavy as old bones, and laid them in each wooden pocket. Each evening he would stand a moment looking at this massive thing take shape. The naked beams, the half-wrought shop, loomed like the outlines of strange buildings to his eye: half memory-palace, half the vision of God’s City that Saint Augustine described.

  The partners worked together in those months as they had never done before, and never would again. In the cave of Peter’s recollection he and Gutenberg and Fust are figures by a constant fire, stooped and sketching, talking and gesticulating at all hours. What had been left of Fust’s eight hundred guilders quickly disappeared into the workshop’s maw; they would need more, much more. They’d make at least a hundred copies of the book; whatever they could get as a deposit from each buyer would bring something in, but even so they wouldn’t see real revenue for several years. They came to a new business understanding, based not on faith but more on risk and its reward—and most of all on cunning. Neither partner harbored much illusion after all that wasted time; each knew precisely where the other stood. It was the firmest ground on which to strike a deal, Fust told his son: either both would win together, or else both would lose.