Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel

by Alix Christie

  And even so, the thing just crawled. A week passed, then ten days, and all they’d managed to produce was the first three pages of Saint Jerome’s prologue. They’d had to print two dozen extra copies of each page, to compensate for wastage. Then it was three weeks, halfway through September. Soon it would be Michaelmas, and they had managed only six pages in a book that ran to nearly fourteen hundred. At this rate, Hans said, chewing at his lip, even if you rounded, it would take them seven years.

  Fust’s face grew blotched, the master’s blacker. Like rabid dogs they watched the crew: the more they watched, the more the ink balls slipped and the paper missed. Peter felt for Ruppel and Keffer; he sensed their fear of slipping and the sickness in their guts. He and Hans were not exempt: woe betide the man who made a setting error, if the master found it printed there. “F!” he’d bawl, or “M!” and reach a lightning hand to pluck out the offending letter. Hans or Peter would step out with the replacement, flinching as the reject whistled past. Gutenberg made not the slightest effort to control his temper, flinging, shouting, cursing, punching at the air. Pustules, cretins, misbegotten blackguards, spawn of Satan—he dispensed them all. He’d left no margin for such errors, it appeared—and that, to Peter, was the greatest error of them all.

  The book had been designed to save on paper. There were no blanks left for a lavish painting; every line was calculated closely, to squeeze the most from every paper bale. Those bales, of course, were paid for out of Fust’s new capital investment, which he had borrowed not just for supplies but for the workers’ pay and room and board. It took no special skill to note the waste sheets mounting and the corresponding tightness in the partners’ jaws. Vast sums were riding on it, every man among them knew; the master had spent frugally, but freely. No man alive had ever before ordered ten full bales of paper and five thousand calfskins at a single stroke, Peter was quite certain.

  He used to wonder what those herdsmen and those paper makers thought. There must have been a glut of veal and calves’ legs up in Swabia, he reckoned. Never in their lives had shepherds seen such quantities, such promises of guilders. They had to wonder, and no doubt aloud—though Fust was satisfied, he said, by the discretion of the leader of the butchers’ guild. No stranger came to Mainz who was not welcomed in the tavern of some brotherhood, and quietly paid on Fust’s account, and told to keep his business to himself.

  The ring that circled them was hard to see, but it was there. When the harvest started, they found jugs of the last pressing of the grapes upon the granite stoop. Round loaves of bread were left, and honey, bacon, in a basket someone set up by the alley door. It must have been the second week when Peter noticed that there were sprigs of mugwort tucked around the eaves, a wreath of rosemary hung on the portal to the yard. The men of Mainz kept their lips shut; the women hung their charms to ward off evils; the Lord up in His heaven watched.

  A month went by before Fust grimly said they had to find a faster way. The master flapped his hand at Peter the next morning just as soon as he arrived. Gutenberg was seated at his stool, the desk before him littered with odd strips of print. He started speaking before Peter even came in earshot: “. . . win more lines.” He brandished a poor waste sheet. “Cram in more words.” Peter saw that he had pasted one more line beneath each crooked column. “Don’t wag your head at me.” The master’s eyebrows bristled. “Just shut your mouth and do it.”

  Mutely Peter took the sheet. In the composing room he walked toward the granite stone on which the second page of Genesis lay waiting. They’d printed off the first real page of scripture just the day before. Fury shook his fingers as he opened up the twine and pulled the top line from the second column, moved it to the bottom of the first. Just yesterday he’d felt his heart sing as he set: he’d marveled as he etched Creation’s shape, and laughed to think he’d set a whale, but never seen one. And now this madman planned to mar this perfect symmetry. Jaw clenched, he set the next two lines to fill the foot of that right-hand column. He tied it, carried it to Keffer. “Blasphemy,” he muttered, neck hairs rising as the master dogged him close behind. “I never said that you would like it,” Gutenberg growled in response.

  He kept on droning even after Peter had joined Hans at their composing stools. They’d save the price of one whole book, he said. If they didn’t learn by doing, cutting costs, they’d never even make it to the Psalms. Already they’d spent more than anyone had reckoned. Peter heard the worm turn in his ear: We’ve got to beat this beast, or it will get the best of us.

  No sooner had the press begun to punch those one-and-forty lines than Gutenberg was back, like a bad dream. His long nose poked in through the aperture that served as door. “We can get more. I’m sure of it. We can win more.”

  Peter ground his teeth to keep himself from cursing him aloud. “You will destroy the page. Distort the golden mean.” He shook his head, past caring. “It will look cramped and cheap as any pocket Bible.” He threw his hand toward those close-jammed written sheets from which they set. The master turned and disappeared.

  An hour later Wiegand summoned Peter. “Master says you have to come upstairs.”

  Gutenberg and Fust were at the great oak table, standing and frowning down at two sheets laid out side by side. His father glanced at him, his arms held stiffly at his back. “You have refused, I hear,” he said, “to add another line.” His face was grave.

  “It will distort it beyond measure.”

  Gutenberg spread one stained hand across the text. “This shape is sacred, then, you say?” Peter curtly nodded. The master dropped his hand and stared off into space. “There has to be another way.”

  He swept his dark eyes first toward Fust, then Peter. “Mechanics,” he enjoined his right-hand man. “Think on the mechanics. What other way is there, to gain more space upon the page?”

  He spoke in singsong, like a Latin master. Peter frowned, and strained his inner eye. Blurrily at first, and then more firmly, he grasped his meaning.

  “Take some away.”

  The master waited.

  “Take out some space,” said his apprentice. “Between the lines?”

  “That’s how I see it, yes.” The gray, lined face began to lift into a smile.

  Which is how the crew spent miseries of days and weeks in numbing labor, filing down the letters. The type was cast on shanks they had made slightly larger for their first, aborted missal. Now they could shave off a tiny sliver top and bottom, thus reducing space between the lines. It took three weeks and endless bellyaching from the men. Even Ruppel, with his fists like hams, was made to wield a file. Ingrates, scoffed the master: better fingerless than starved. When they had planed enough to make the page that followed, Peter set it up and Ruppel pulled a proof.

  As he set it, he was filled with great foreboding. The text itself told of the fall from grace through greed and pride, and man’s expulsion from the Garden. And still man’s perfidy went on, and Cain slew Abel. Peter took the printed proof from Ruppel with a sickness in his heart.

  And yet—O wonder—when he laid the proof beside its facing page, no difference could be spied. But to his scribal eye, that second page, for all its tale of woe, was even lovelier than the one it lay beside. The text was tighter, blacker, more a forceful mesh than airy vines. Peter stared at it, quite disbelieving. He looked up and met the master’s eye. “How did you know?”

  “Ha,” he said. “Blind faith.” He gave his doggy grin. “Should cut the paper by a tenth.”

  The wells beneath his eyes were dark with filing and fatigue, for he had whittled right beside them. To anyone outside he would have looked demented. Yet there was method in his madness, Peter had to grudgingly admit. He did not entertain despair: he did not even let it enter the same room. The man just kept on plowing, probing, pushing—almost seemed to relish how the matter twisted and resisted him. He had more patience for raw matter than for men, that much was clear—and even then some things were sacred, others must be shed. Peter learned this from
him, for himself, when it came time to print the separate red lines.

  Fust could hardly wait to see those printed rubricating lines. It would amaze his buyers, once they understood that they were inked not by a pen but by a press. The carmine ink the master mixed himself: oil of linseed boiled to varnish, mixed with powdered copper, cinnabar, some carbonate of lead. This yielded a glossy orange red. The oil was key; Fust nodded: he had seen that telltale shimmer in the new Dutch paintings at the fair. He trundled off then to the Kaufhaus, humming to himself, while they made up the forme.

  At first, God smiled. The red lines starting Jerome’s prologue printed perfectly. Simple enough: they topped the column. The second red line, though, sat halfway down the facing page. Peter measured, tried to place the thing just right. They proofed it, tinkered, shifted the line up, then right, then left. Each time they peeled the proof sheet off they cursed, and wiggled it some more. Sometimes it overlapped the black, sometimes it stuck out past the margin. It took six tries—six wasted sheets, a quarter of a guilder—to get the damned thing right.

  The whole time Gutenberg looked on, silently for once, eyes narrowed into slits. He’d let them fail all by themselves, thought Peter bitterly. Finally he just reset the whole cursed column, then took away the lines they had already printed black. One hundred thirty-five red lines went through the press that second hellish day, which stretched far in the night.

  Fust had come in halfway through, then left; Gutenberg, too, waited to say anything until the run was done. It was past ten when Peter hung up his apron. Wiegand had informed him that the master wanted him upstairs. The boy shot off, no doubt to haul Fust back. Slowly Peter wiped the scarlet from his hands and dragged his body up the treads.

  Gutenberg stood at the window, staring out across the lane on to the synagogue. He nodded briefly. “We’ll wait for him,” he said. Peter sat. His stomach growled. At length the master came and sat beside him at the table. “You tried it every way you could.” His voice was calm and uninflected.

  Peter made a motion of disgust. “Without success.”

  “Success is only ever an equation. Time invested, plus materials, equals the true price.”

  They heard Fust’s tread then on the stairs. Gutenberg looked long at Peter, as if weighing something. When Fust appeared, he started speaking. “The red must go. Or it will ruin us, or kill us—maybe both.”

  Fust’s face lost all animation. His eyes went flat, moving between his partner and his son. He strode to where the sheets lay waiting.

  “This one looks marvelous.” He riffled lightly through the pile. “And this. And this.” Again his eyes rose, past the printer’s head, searching out his son’s.

  “Barely half are fine,” the master shortly answered. “It took two days, and what—ten sheets, fifteen?—of waste.” He too turned, his eyes resting on his lead compositor.

  Peter tried to sit up straighter in the chair. His eyeballs ached, his fingers, shoulders. But what hurt most was that he’d failed. He reached and pulled a sheet toward him and tried to shake the blackness that he felt.

  “A Calvary,” he said, almost to himself. He looked at Gutenberg, gave a short nod. He could not meet his father’s eyes.

  “We can’t reset each page, nor build another press, just for the red.” The master’s voice had softened. Even he knew Fust would feel it as a blow. “The only sane thing is to drop it.”

  Peter felt his father stiffen. He raised his head, saw Fust shake his. “We had agreed.”

  Surely, Fust said, turning now to Gutenberg, it was a matter of more thought, more calculation. “This was to be the crowning glory.”

  “‘Who against hope believed in hope,’” the master said in answer. “I wish it were not so.” He put a hand out to his partner.

  But Fust had twisted brusquely toward his son. “I can’t believe that you agree.”

  “These lines took sixteen hours alone.” It pained him, but he saw no choice. “I don’t see how—though I regret it.”

  Fust looked between them for a long time: from master to apprentice, both alike in filth and weariness.

  “It would take half again as long,” the master said. “There is a rubric every third, fourth page.”

  “We knew that from the start.” Fust’s mouth was set, his eyes more gray than blue. The look he gave his son was like a boot. “I thought we planned to make a fine and mighty thing,” he said, and set the page back down. More perfect than the most perfect manuscript it was always meant to be.

  Fust faced the two of them with bitter eyes, as if they’d forged some dark, satanic bond against him.

  “We have to gain more speed.” Gutenberg leaned toward his partner. Attend, he said: at this rate they took two months for each quire. “We need another man, it seems to me.”

  Fust’s mouth twitched. Then he harshly laughed. The sound was forced, unpleasant. “First you kick me, then you strip me bare.”

  CHAPTER 8

  JOURNEYMEN

  [3 quires of 65]

  December 1452

  THE ADVENT SEASON came, and with it the relief and warmth of firesides and candles, of drawing close in the community of Christ. Peter had been courting Anna all that autumn, walking with her while the married men of Mainz slept off their Sunday lunch. He’d toss a pebble at her window, and they’d steal away into the little lanes or walk among the bare boughs of the orchards. As it got colder, they would slip into an empty chapel and warm themselves in some back pew. Quite early on she’d asked if he would read to her; she brought him block books she collected for the pictures. Though these were crude, she listened raptly as he read their message of salvation. In the dimness he sought other verses, psalms that she had learned by heart, and traced her fine cold fingers on the words.

  The Christ’s mass gift that he might give her sprang to mind this way. He made a little book of stories she would know, lettered in his simplest cursive: the parable of Dives and the beggar; the raising up of Lazarus; the Pater Noster and her favorite psalms. He has this book still, locked in a small chest inside his big new house in Frankfurt. He still can see her shining face and how she clapped her hands in wonder. The heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands.

  Her gift to him was likewise from her hands. She painted him a portrait of Saint Peter at the gate, with Peter’s own brown beard, his narrow, sober face. “Heresy,” he said, laughing, and brought her fingers to his lips. They met in secret, though of course her parents knew. A few months in, Klaus cornered him and plainly asked him his intention. Marriage, Peter answered, and Klaus frowned and fingered his thick beard. They both knew Fust would not approve without a fight.

  Peter watched and waited for a likely moment, but his father’s mood was not improved. He was still angry over the lost ruby lines—disgruntled, too, to see how fast his guilders gushed. They paid dues to carpenters and smiths and tanners, butchers, bakers, brewers, although he drew the line at tipping off the painters who worked hand in glove with scribes. He wasn’t just some pig to stick and bleed, he growled—although the new man, too, in due course did arrive, another mouth that he must pay and feed and house.

  This fellow hailed from Alsace like the others, though Johann Mentelin was not a smith, praise God. Peter was delighted to discover he had been a clerk in Strassburg’s bishopric. Nor was he a mere notary: he specialized in gilding letters and had a flowing, calligraphic hand. How in God’s name had Gutenberg seduced him? Peter wondered underneath his breath as they all stood to greet him. Hans shook his rippled forehead and just laughed.

  The new compositor swore his oath of secrecy on the first page of their Bible. A sum of money passed into the master’s hand: the training fee, which Mentelin would pay half at John the Baptist, half at the Solemnity of Mary. His coming raised the level of the talk inside the shop. His Latin was impeccable; he’d studied in Erfurt a few years ahead of Peter. At noon he’d bow his ginger head, recite the readings with his eyes closed from
the book stored in his mind. The jokes were ribald, naturally, when the master said where he would start. He’d pick up setting where they broke the book into a second volume: Proverbs, followed by the Canticum Canticorum, the randy, lovesick Song of Songs.

  They numbered nine or so that first Yule at Fust’s table—the master and apprentices and journeymen, plus the boys they’d dubbed their devils. His father had convened them on the feast of the Three Patriarchs, those Hebrew men of staunch, unyielding faith. The groaning board was meant to mark their first full year of common labor, he declared. Exceptionally, the workingmen had bathed. Their eyes went wide at the long table draped in Flemish lace, the beeswax flames reflected in the silver platters. Pork haunch with cherries, ducks with sage clamped in their yellow bills, heaps of greens and tubers—and that was nothing to the Riesling and the Spätburgunder. Along the sideboard Grede had ranged a deadly chorus of assorted brandies. The master stood and tapped his goblet with a knife and bid them shut their gabbling mouths.

  “I give you Johann Fust,” he roared. Already he had had a few. The men began to drum their feet upon the floor. His father smiled and whispered something in Grede’s ear, and rose.

  “It’s been a long year, but a good one,” he began. “We’re making slow but steady progress.” His eyes went all around the table; when they came to Peter, he paused slightly, then moved on.

  The master leaned, and cracked: “We’re out of Kings, is what he means, and into Proverbs. Though I am sorry to report that Peter is still wandering the Garden.” The mugs flew up, and Keffer yelled “Hear! Hear!” Peter stood, and took a little bow, then raised his own.