Johann Gutenberg felt himself anointed, chosen, just as Peter did. But this was not enough. He had to rub their noses in it, claim it all—make sure that he was seen and praised, acknowledged by the world.
CHAPTER 6
JOHANNESFIRE
Feast of John the Baptist (24 June 1452)
ON MIDSUMMER’S DAY they laid the fire out in a flattened field behind the waters of the Bleiche. The air was too dry to risk the need-fire closer to the houses. The council had considered banning any bonfire altogether, until the livestock handlers howled. There was a need, that year as every year, to purge all sickness from the herds. There could not be relief, for man or beast, without Johannisfeuer.
Who did not feel renewed, indeed, by flames that burned the dross away? The summer bonfires of Peter’s childhood still were close inside his heart. “Higher, higher!” voices always chanted, children crying “Two ells, three!” and leaping and laughing to feel the hellfire licking at their feet and know the harvest would be just as high. Each year he’d watched the women gather the St.-John’s-wort on the bright and shadeless stroke of noon; how he had marveled, as a child, to see them rub those yellow stars that gave off bright red drops of Christ’s own blood.
The master let them put away their tools before the sun had started sinking in the sky. Not out of any kindness, or to free them for the celebration, though. Peter saw him make his way toward the quay and the Frankfurt market boat. Of course—for it was the feast of John the Baptist, the twenty-fourth of June, the day that payments on the Elders’ bonds were made. The only heavy hearts were on the councils of free cities that were forced to pay. Each rich man had his little sack of gold, each workingman a copper heller for his purse, which wife or daughter lined with orchid root to keep the luck from draining out.
Peter told Hans and Ruppel they should find a high spot on the hill to view the spectacle of bonfires burning on each distant slope, each village and each peak along the Rhine. It seemed to him that God above must love that sight, for all its heathen roots: the pinpoints strung along the river like a gleaming rope of fire. By the way that Keffer brushed his yellow beard, they knew that he would court that night—as Peter would himself this year. He’d asked Anna to come watch the fire with him on the hill of the Altmünster. It happened that the year was one in seven, so the pilgrims from the east had come by oxen train and mule to board in Mainz the ships that would carry them to Aachen. They camped outside the cloister walls, and reverenced the relic on its altar, a sweat cloth used by some early Christian martyr. It seemed to Peter quite a fitting place to stand and watch, for goldsmiths, most particularly, were cautioned to keep distance from the solstice flames—and he did count himself, by now, among their number. Their patron saint, Eligius, warned Christians quite expressly to beware the dancing and the chants, the heathen burning of the herbs for luck, as superstition if not worse.
Anna’s mother was a dyer and a weaver; for that reason Anna knew the Bleiche well, and gave him as a meeting point the dyers’ hut. She’d paid a boy to send her note; when it arrived, he tried to open it in private, but Ruppel saw it and sang out.
“Sweets for Saint Peter, eh?” He grinned and wiped his hands upon an inky rag.
“You know a setter does it with great feeling in the fingertips.” Keffer winked.
“I hate to think what pressmen do,” Peter laughed in answer, conjuring some strapping, well-built lass. “Each to his own, I say, and may we all come back half sober.”
He dressed with care in fresh fawn leggings, belted on a blue-green tunic. He did not wish to make himself too fine, yet as he prepared his body for her eyes, he felt that any less would be too little. Smoke was curling from the chimney as he neared the hut; the order had not yet gone out to douse the city’s fires. His heart pressed hard against his ribs, which seemed to spring and open like a lock when he first saw her waiting with a basket on her arm. She took his outstretched hand and put it to her cheek, then gave it back. He asked her what she hoped to gather in her basket, and she looked out from those dark almond eyes and laughed.
“What would you like me to collect?” she asked.
“My fingers, and my toes, my hair, my eyes, my clothes.” He made to peel each thing away in naming it, and cast each part inside her woven bowl.
“Ah, that would never do,” she said. “For I would have you whole.”
She showed him in. He understood that she was showing, too, the women gathered there that all was seemly and correct. Her mother smiled, and straightened from her stirring at the tub. She could not greet him properly; she flapped her blood-red hands. It shocked him, just a little—all those women with their skirts hiked up, above that boiling tub of madder root, their aprons stained as if with gore. They dyed the linen there in shades of coral, brick, and rose, and dried it on the posts along the brook. The boiling room was hot and close, like a confinement, he supposed. They fled at last to cooler air and sweeping vistas from the hill.
There was a little bridge that led them up across the fields and to the wilder bushes just below the Altmünster. Anna would not go beyond the hedges to the holy ground until she’d gathered up the herbs she’d need that evening. He nodded, dumbly, said he’d be her willing slave. Here we can find the comfrey and the elderberry bush, she said. He held her basket as she plucked and did not try to hide how much the watching of her slender, bending body pleased his eyes.
“But you can pick as well,” she said after some time. “Why should the woman do all the work?” He laughed at that, and called her rebel, and she flashed her eyes.
“I think such hands as yours are used to labor.” She took one, turning up his palm. He felt her trace the lines with every tingling fiber. “Such hands, on such a gentleman.” She laughed and shook her head. For they were rough, of course, and shiny with hard wear.
“The wonder is they have not lost their feeling.” He squirmed inside, recalling Keffer’s jest.
“Why should they? When they do the same, with God’s Word, every day?”
He wanted then to kneel before her and bury face and arms and heart. Yet when he raised his eyes he saw upon her face a strange, contorted look. It pierced him, how she seemed, all turned within herself. He did not know then how to read her.
“These hands,” he said, and raised her palm to place it praying to his own, “are simply tools. For gathering or painting, making letters, it is much the same.”
“You know that it’s not so.” She bit her lip and shook her head.
He thought he understood then her reluctance, her shrinking.
“What makes you think this hand is different?” he asked.
“You know as well as I,” she said, and looked severe.
“I do not, truly.”
She shook her dark and shining head; he saw the struggle on her lips. “It has—much finer things in store,” she said at last, her hand still captive in his own.
“And that’s the matter.” Unequivocally, he knew it. “That’s why you turn and look away. Because of who my father is?”
She took an elderberry from her basket, crushing it between her fingers. Pale green juice ran down her skin. “I am a painter’s daughter. You, a clericus.” She looked him gravely in the face. “I do not think your father has a bride like me in mind.”
“My father’s dead these fifteen years.”
But she was not convinced.
He told her then that Johann Fust could not refuse. How could he possibly, when he himself had chosen Grede? A craftsman’s daughter, and a binder, with strong hands like hers, though not so elegant and fine.
“You do not jest?” She cocked her head, a little ember glowing in her eyes.
He laced her arms around his neck and laid his forehead down to hers. “Here in the sight of God, I swear to you. No other woman holds the keys to this poor kingdom.”
In the shimmer in her eyes he saw as much of heaven as a man can pray for in this life, the darkness stirring with a flame that burned him to her, sol
dered him forever to her frame. They pressed together, scorched, their eagerness and hunger naked as the white curve of her neck. Only with the greatest effort did they step apart and, bodies bursting, gasp the sweetness of the evening. Never had he felt such torment, yet such peace.
“Shhh,” she said, as he began to speak. She put a finger to his lips, and he could not prevent himself from seizing it, and sucking it, and pulling her back to his hips. She groaned, and they were only saved by a great sound, of men and women cheering, and the thud of ax on wood.
“God help me,” he said hoarsely. “I am but a beast.”
“No beast, but Adam’s flesh.” She kissed him, chastely, and began to straighten up her hair.
He wove her a garland of St.-John’s-wort, for even Peter knew that it was used for strength on a long journey. They embarked that night for somewhere neither one had been before. She took it from his hands and said to add more blossoms, so he did, and then she placed it on her waist and let him fix it there, with kisses up her dress and to the open swelling of her breasts. She reminded him of the tradition as she led him toward the fire. The solstice belt of mugwort is a charm against all sickness, for the leaching of all evil: a pledge they tossed into the fire to guarantee their health. “They even say”—she smiled—“that if you hang one in your house, it wards off looks from evil men.”
“Then hang a dozen, when this night is done,” he said as they stepped into the mass of dark and dancing bodies in the bonfire’s glow. He saw her parents there, her brothers, painters, tanners, weavers, bakers, coopers, saddlers: men and women lined and hard from scraping, beating, shaping, forming. Hans, too, Ruppel, Keffer, those last two with girls, drawn like himself to that communion with their fellows. He thought he saw his uncle, then his cousin, in the flashing of the fire; he saw them, then he lost them in the dance, which wove and leapt around with screams and shouts—and all that while, as he could hear the reeds and flutes beneath his skin, as if the music rose from his own soul, he thought not of God or devil but of Anna, only Anna, with her fire-kissed skin all flushed with love. He knew himself at last to be a child of earth and heaven, body fused to spirit in the sight of God and man, when as the solstice flames died down they looked at one another and agreed, without a word, and ran, and sprang across the embers and came down in one another’s arms. If this be sin, he thought, and tore the belt from round her waist and cast it in the flames and heard the crowd roar praise. They stood there, panting, joined before the world.
CHAPTER 7
IMPRESSORIUM
Tuesday after Saint Augustine (30 August 1452)
THE DAYS of the saints are lettered in red. It has always seemed to Peter Schoeffer that this day should be remembered the same way.
The morning they began the printing on the Bible, the crew came round the press in the cool darkness before dawn. The master stood before that oaken frame, his hair pulled back, his eyes uplifted as if at an altar. “May God Almighty bless this work,” he boomed and raised his arm.
Peter held his breath through that first pull, ears waiting for the telltale metal bite, the little grunt that Ruppel always made at the last tug. Then everyone stepped back as Keffer hauled the whole works out and peeled the printed sheet away. Gutenberg and Fust each took a corner of the sheet and bent their heads, one dark, one fair, and surveyed it closely. Peter never would forget the look of triumph they exchanged.
“Fiat imprimere!” his father cried this time.
The crew all hooted. The press began to crash as the two pressmen found a rhythm. The others should have gone back to their stools in the composing room, but none of them could tear themselves away.
Peter fell in love with the whole motion: of the great sheet lifting and then settling; the hard and painful kiss; the sweet, slight sucking sound of linen peeling from the metal. The master’s ink was as black as the night before Creation, blacker than the oak gall ever was. Peter held it to his eyes and marveled. Never had lines ended in such symmetry; never had the world seen such a thing.
The city just outside their door receded utterly. They were aware only of the chain of being, one man handing the sheet on to the next: the boy who reached it to the inker to the pressman who returned the printed sheet back to the master, his beard tucked into his shirt. Like a living creature they were now, a new and many-headed thing.
And then the glow wore off, as it must always. Yet even at the time Peter knew those days were incandescent, without rival. There was a bursting in him—a heady sense of strength, that wondrous feeling of pure rightness that does shine in every life for some brief time.
It fell to Peter to set the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch of Moses. Hans didn’t care which lines he set, so long as he could do them sitting down. His back had started aching.
“How old are you, then?” Peter asked. Hans scratched his pate and reckoned. “Fifty, maybe,” he said, shrugging. “Sigismund was on the throne.”
They’d work in parallel, the master said: Peter would start on Genesis, Hans on the book of Judges. The text they took from pages torn from that small scribal Paris Bible. The man who’d written it used every trick to shorten the words so he could cram in more. It strained Peter’s mind sometimes to grasp which word was meant by which abbreviation—and he’d been trained. For Hans it was a horror, plainly. “Ex-audio, ex-animo, ex-bloody amino,” he’d mutter, lips protruding with the effort. Peter felt for his old friend. But how to help him, without seeming that he flaunted his own skill? He started turning now and then to him, and asking what he thought some word might be. Hans would grunt, and spit into the can he kept below his feet for just that purpose. How in the devil should he know, if it was gibberish to fancy hands? So Peter wrote a list out of the words that were most common, and their usual abbreviations, made a show of looking at it, asking Hans to scan his lines. Thus did they find a way to choose, together, phrasings of felicity, and lines neither too loose nor tight.
They set it seriatum, page by page. Peter had never read the scriptures in this way, from first word of each chapter to the last, historia unspooling in his hands. He was amazed that he should be the one to put these words on this skin and paper. They shaped it physically, he and Gutenberg and Hans: they made the Word incarnate. Peter would pause sometimes and gaze on his wizened friend as they sat hunched above their letter cases, and ask the Lord how such a task had fallen to such two unlikely men.
If copying a manuscript was prayer, then this was shouting out the psalms from every rooftop. It grew in him with every passing day, this feeling of abashedness and wonder. Why hast Thou, Lord, put such a gift in these poor hands?
It could not be for beauty’s sake alone, or even just to multiply His teachings. It seemed to Peter that God had sent His Word, as He’d once sent His son, to cleanse their corrupt and misguided world. Was this not the clear message of the Gospel according to John? In principio erat verbum: in the beginning was the Word—a Word they flung out now, a boundless net of shining letters, cast out by that great fisher among men.
And when he asked just why this miracle had come to Mainz, the answer came back just as clearly. This gift had been bestowed upon the city of Saint Martin, who tore his cloak in two to clothe a beggar. It was intended, then, for all mankind: the humble just as surely as the rich.
The testaments, of course, are full of trials. From the moment in the Garden that temptation raised its serpent’s head, God set his creature tests to prove his faith. So was it too inside the Humbrechthof as soon as they embarked. Within a week, the problems started.
The sheets were so large and unwieldy that they flapped and slipped. They’d miss a pin, and lodge lopsided when the frame was lowered on the forme. Ruppel, sweating, nearly lost his hand the first time he tried to straighten one that went half-cocked, only springing back just in time. Gutenberg stood over him, haranguing, cursing at each wasted sheet, threatening to dock his pay. He scooped up the wasted sheets, counting and recounting them, his face a fr
ightful sight. A half a dozen, creeping Christ, a bloody fortune. He was seething as he called a halt. “Nail half a dozen extra pins on to that blasted cross.” Ruppel obliged, and the paper slipped much less, although the printing went more slowly for it. Each night the master gathered up those sheets that had been fouled and sourly counted them before he locked them up. Thank God the ones they lost were mostly paper, and not hide; the first time that the pressman and his beater lost a sheet of vellum, the master came up and tore it out of Keffer’s grip and rolled it in a bat that he used to whack him. Then it was laid to rest like a dead thing inside the crate of wasted sheets.
Nor did his glossy, sticky ink hold its shape in that furnace of late summer. With each advancing hour it melted to a slop that either beaded on the letters or just dribbled down their sides. Though Gutenberg reduced the oil and sent for drying agents, still it slopped. So then they’d have to work by cool of night, he said, and cursed the cost of extra candles.
And even so the pages dried and shrank before they had a chance to print the other side; they’d have to dampen the sheets again, but gingerly, and pray they held their shape. Of course the printed sheets could not be laid atop each other, out of fear of the ink smearing. Peter still remembers how young Wiegand staggered, arms held stiffly out, toes seeking out the ladder to the drying line. The drying pages hung above their heads, and swayed and rustled when the master thundered past: a flock of great white gulls that hectored them from overhead, with sharp, black markings on their sides.
Gutenberg was a blur in constant motion, darting back and forth from forge to press, back to the master book upon his desk, prodding, poking, pulling at his lips and beard. He was the only one who moved; the rest of them were chained to their respective stations. Fust appeared each evening as the crew began their nightly shift, but Master Gutenberg was always there: he never seemed to leave, even to eat or sleep. There was no moment—waking, sleeping, upstairs, down—when they were free of him, his beady eyes, his dark, oppressive presence.
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