Printer's Error

by Rebecca Romney

  When Lenox discovered that he was the lucky owner of America’s first Gutenberg Bible, he was not thrilled. Okay, that’s putting it lightly. Arguing that he hadn’t authorized such an unreasonable and exorbitant price, he initially refused to pay it at all. His agents were left with an enormously expensive book on their hands. They approached the aforementioned Sir Thomas (no doubt sheepishly) and asked if the gentleman might be interested in purchasing the Bible for £475 (a 5 percent discount!). Sir Thomas wrote the following reply, “Sir, as I would not give more than 300 pounds for [the Bible] in cold blood, there is no chance of my having the Book, and it is right that America should boast of having one copy of it. I am therefore willing to let it go, only hoping that it may not be swallowed up by the Deep Sea.” After the public embarrassment at the auction house, Sir Thomas must have felt awfully good about sending that letter. Lenox eventually did recover from the sticker shock and made the reasonable decision to accept the Gutenberg Bible at the unreasonable price of £500. If one of these Bibles appeared on the market today, it would easily fetch tens of millions of dollars.

  Yet that’s unlikely. Most modern owners of Gutenberg Bibles are revered institutions that would never trade a cultural icon of human achievement for a measly thirty million dollars. Then again, a single Gutenberg Bible was put up for sale in 2009, albeit to a very select group of consumers. The extraordinary circumstances of that case date back to the Second World War.

  In May 1945, just after the fall of Nazi Germany, triumphant Soviet forces entered the city of Leipzig and looted it, secretly carrying away two Gutenberg Bibles. Because the Soviet Union was run by cultural sociopaths, they denied the possession of these Bibles well into the 1990s. It’s not like the Russians gave them back, even after admitting the theft. In their view, the Motherland had defended itself against the Nazis, so Germany could, with all due respect, fuck off. Then, in an ironic twist, one of those Gutenberg Bibles disappeared from Moscow State University.

  In 2009, three agents working for the Federal Security Service, the modern successor to the KGB, took advantage of their positions and stole one of the stolen Leipzig Bibles. The Bible was eventually recovered in a sting operation set up by the FSS itself after the conspirators attempted to sell the Bible for the shockingly low price of one million dollars. “These people were not art specialists,” commented the court spokeswoman.

  The leader of this idiotic band, one Colonel Vedishchev, was sentenced to more than three years’ penal servitude. The reclaimed B42 reportedly had to undergo “repair work after a page was cut out for the buyer to check its authenticity.” That one sentence is enough to cause a seizure in any rare book dealer, but at least we’ve learned that testing the authenticity of a black market book is essentially the same process as testing the quality of a kilo of cocaine.

  From the very beginning, it seems the question of who owned Gutenberg’s creations has been disputed. Whatever the verdict of the infamous lawsuit brought against Gutenberg by his ex-partner Johann Fust, current scholars believe that after B42 was completed, the joint “work of books” between the two men officially ceased. Frustratingly, the little we do know about Gutenberg’s work serves to highlight just how much we don’t. For example, we have no idea where Gutenberg’s print shop stood. Because the Fust shop was in Mainz, it seems reasonable that Gutenberg was also printing there, but without a single document containing his business address, it’s hard to say where he was printing, or even if he closed up shop after the lawsuit.

  The picture of Gutenberg’s financial endeavors is complicated even further by the recent (if you consider 1889 “recent”) theory that Gutenberg was actually running two separate print shops in the 1450s. One shop would have been printing B42 in association with Fust and Schöffer. The other would have completed “jobbing printing,” that is, fast printing jobs that resulted in immediate cash. You know, your typical moneymakers like indulgences for the Church and calendars for bloodletting. These flotsam-and-jetsam printing contracts are some of the earliest known specimens of print, but many of today’s known fragments survive only because they were used as worthless scrap paper in other books. In the nineteenth century, for example, a printed bloodletting calendar from the 1450s was found inside the binding of an accountant’s book. Yep, that seems about right.

  To recap: we don’t know when Gutenberg was born; we don’t know where he worked; two-thirds of the original manuscripts mentioning him are no longer extant; even the church where he was likely buried was demolished three hundred years ago; and we have absolutely nothing printed by him that contains his name. Enough is enough! All this could have been avoided if Gutenberg had just printed his motherfucking name on his motherfucking books. (The authors apologize for using expletives in connection with the Gutenberg Bible. It’s a rather accurate representation of our scholarly frustration. Also, if Samuel L. Jackson had been a Gutenberg historian, it’s what he would have said.)

  While unearthing the first printed book in Western history and assigning it correctly to Johannes Gutenberg has been a Herculean achievement, other books and authors have been memorialized by print despite their best efforts to the contrary. And this is how Trithemius, a Benedictine monk from a small abbey in Germany, came to be remembered as one of the foremost dark magicians of the Catholic Church.

  SCHOLARS GENERALLY organize Trithemius’s writings into three main categories: monastic issues, histories, and demonology. We’re hoping that last one made you pause. Trithemius was into some strange stuff, and he was eventually outed in a most unfortunate way. In 1499 he wrote a letter to a friend and fellow monk, Arnold Bostius. The two monks had the kind of relationship where Trithemius felt comfortable opening up about his views regarding the true powers of the universe, and man’s ability to control those powers through, well, magical means.

  These days, incantations and pictographs aren’t normally associated with Benedictine monks. They weren’t in Trithemius’s day, either. If it had gotten out that Trithemius was deeply interested in the conjuration or banishment of demons, angels, and witches, it would have created a small scandal. So Trithemius kept his views close to his chest and discussed them only in the privacy of selected personal letters, such as the ones to Arnold Bostius.

  Here’s a life tip, dear reader, directly from Trithemius to you. If you want to keep a secret secret, never write it down. Never. Not anywhere. Not anytime. It’s like when you’re at work and you email your friend across the room about Susan being a total bitch. The thing is, Susan is going to read that email. She will. If you write it down, chances are she (or someone sympathetic to her) is going to see it. Which is fine, if you don’t mind snuffing out the last defense mechanism Susan held on to after the divorce. You monster.

  Trithemius also learned this lesson a little too late. When he sent his letter to Bostius, he had no idea that the intended recipient had died just a short time before. The ill-fated correspondence then found its way into the hands of the prior of the convent, a man who wasted little love on the outspoken Trithemius of Sponheim Abbey. Rather than quietly slipping the letter into a rubbish bin, the prior did exactly the opposite and circulated it as a public denouncement of Trithemius, practitioner of black magic.

  What did Trithemius write to Bostius that got the prior’s habit in such a knot? He informed his friend that he was furiously working on a series of books addressing the very important subject of steganography, which sounds innocent enough. Today steganography is a computer coding term for concealing a text or image within another text or image. But the person who invented the word had something a bit more unusual in mind. Derived from the Greek words steganos (“concealed”) and graphein (“to write”), steganography, to Trithemius, was a framework by which human beings could transmit messages over great distances with total fidelity, using an occult system of angel conjuring. It was like a fifteenth-century telegraph, only powered by miracles instead of science.

  Trithemius told Bostius that a shadowy figure had appea
red to him in the middle of the night and taught him the ancient secrets of steganography. These secrets were summarized in the letter, and Trithemius informed his friend that he was working on something called Steganographia, a four-book instruction manual on this arcane method of secure communication. The fallout from his public outing, however, forced Trithemius to abandon the project partway through book three.

  Some people reading this might not find Trithemius’s idea so odd. Isn’t transmitting messages the traditional job of angels? The Greek word angelos means “messenger,” after all. Well, Trithemius’s angels were less “hark the herald” and more Book of Revelation. If incantations were said wrong, or symbols drawn too hastily, or the wrong direction was faced, these angels could wreak righteous havoc on their summoners. Steganography, Trithemius wrote, “is very difficult and full of danger because of the pride and rebellion of its spirits, who do not obey a man unless he is very experienced in this art . . . if they should be too strongly pressed on, they frequently do injury to [the novice] and offend them by various delusions.”

  Other dangers one might encounter when trying to control rebellious spirits include angels bursting in on recipients at inappropriate times; spirits working themselves into an unholy frenzy and alerting everyone in the village; and giving your letter to the one person from whom you wish to keep it secret. Aw, c’mon regional angel Pamersyel, you handed that email right to Susan!

  Recently there have been suggestions that Trithemius’s Steganographia was a clever ruse to present his studies on cryptography within the guise of cabalist magic, but to say that trivializes Trithemius’s decades of private arcane beliefs and writings (with titles ranging from Antipalus maleficiorum and De demonibus, to De morbo caduco et maleficiis). Cryptography certainly plays an important role in Steganographia, but if you were going to hide your involvement in cryptographic studies, why choose a framework that would blacklist you from the religious community and forever brand you a dark magician? In 1508, Trithemius completed a “natural” version of his work entitled Polygraphia. It was like Steganographia, but without the angel conjuring—essentially just a simple handbook of codes and ciphers. (Note that “simple” refers only to angel conjuring: the Polygraphia is actually a brilliant landmark of codicology known for its meticulous descriptions. The first edition now sells for thousands of dollars and is worth every penny.)

  Steganographia certainly wasn’t something Trithemius wanted out in the public eye—and with good reason. Almost a century after his death, Trithemius’s Steganographia was printed in Frankfurt. Three years later, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of 1609, the Catholic Church’s official list of banned books, branded it a work of heresy. As long as manuscript copies were being passed from town to town by a quiet network of occult supporters, Trithemius’s unique mix of arcana, Christianity, and spirit summoning posed little threat. But hand that sucker over to the long arm of the printing press, and Rome itself sits up to take notice. Steganographia remained on the Index for the next three hundred years. Thanks to the printing press, Trithemius’s demonology, “a minor current” when compared to the rest of his writings, became his most definitive historical trait. Maybe he was right to hate Gutenberg’s invention after all.

  Trithemius died at St. Jacob’s in Würzburg in December 1516, almost fifty years after the death of Gutenberg. A champion of educating the clergy, he served as an abbot from age twenty-two until his passing at age fifty-four. During that time, he built libraries, authored a flood of religious and historical treatises, and played host to princes, dukes, and emperors. Yet a pamphlet aimed at shaming his lazy monks and a treatment of arcane cryptography that was never supposed to be published have enshrined him within the halls of history as the magical monk who hated printing.

  Still, at least Trithemius was remembered, due in no small part to the printing press. For hundreds of years, Gutenberg was not remembered at all because he never printed his own name. One of the most important technological innovations of human history almost passed through the annals of time disembodied from its real inventor. Had it not been for a scattering of handwritten manuscripts that were printed in the 1700s, Johannes Gutenberg would have been sentenced to obscurity. Whether on papyrus, vellum, paper, or digital text, sometimes the wrong people are forgotten, and sometimes those who are remembered are remembered for the wrong reasons. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  3

  TREES OF TRUTH

  THE REIGN OF KING HENRY VIII during the first half of the sixteenth century indelibly changed the course of English history. And one of the stupidest fights during that reign began in 1511, just two years after Henry was crowned. In that year a boy was born to a tailor and then promptly died five weeks later. Of itself this isn’t noteworthy, especially during a time when living to thirty was a cosmic crapshoot, but the events that played out after the funerary services sent shock waves throughout the city of London, and epitomized the need for serious religious reform.

  The word mortuary meant something very different in the sixteenth century than it does today. When a grieving father, Richard Hunne, took his son’s body to St. Mary’s Church to be buried, the priest asked for a mortuary after the services were completed. In this context, a mortuary is a gift to the officiating priest from the deceased person’s estate—a death tax, of sorts. But because the deceased was a five-week-old, he didn’t have much property to tax. In fact, it could be argued that a dead infant doesn’t possess any property at all, so he should be exempted from the normal ecclesiastical payoffs. Yet thinking that would make you quite a bit more compassionate than Richard Hunne’s priest.

  In May 1512, this priest sued Richard Hunne in a London Bishop’s Court, a spiritual court ultimately controlled by the pope, for the sheet in which the dead child had previously been christened. And if that weren’t crazy enough, he won the case. The soon-to-be Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, ruled in favor of the priest and demanded that Hunne surrender his dead son’s sheet. What on earth would a priest even do with a young boy’s sheet? In the twenty-first century, it would probably be best to immediately abandon this line of questioning, which is fine, because the intentions of the priest are beside the point. Richard Hunne had questioned the actions of the Church. Therefore, he had to be put in his place.

  Hunne stood his ground. He flat-out refused to hand over the sheet. As a result, he was publicly denounced by the Church: “Hunne, thou art accursed.” That’s right, for not relinquishing the one memento of his dead son, Richard Hunne saw his soul damned to hell for all eternity. In response, he brought a praemunire action against the priest, a provision of the law that asserted the authority of the king and his temporal courts over the pope and his spiritual ones.

  Before the praemunire suit was settled, however, a raid on Hunne’s house turned up some religious books in English. The possession of said books had been outlawed more than a century earlier. The most powerful charge against him was that he “hath in his keeping diverse English books prohibit and damned by the law: as the Apocalypse in English, Epistles and Gospels in English, Wycliffe’s damnable works, other books containing infinite errors in the which he hath been long time accustomed to read, teach, and study daily.” On December 2, 1514, Hunne was formally charged with heresy, arrested, and interred in a tower in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Two days later, the London tailor was found hanging by the neck from the rafters in his cell.

  The Church and its defenders, people such as Bishop Tunstall and the fiercely orthodox statesman Thomas More (more on this fellow later), declared Hunne’s death a suicide. Case closed. Move on, people. Then details of the case began to emerge. Things such as Hunne’s wrists showing evidence of being bound, the stool he used being found clear across the room—oh, and then there were hand marks on his neck, where he manually strangled himself before the hanging. The inquest investigating Hunne’s death noted these details and more: “Also we find in a corner, somewhat beyond the place where he did hang, a great parcel
of blood. Also within the flap of the left side of his jacket, we find a great cluster of blood, and the jacket folden down thereupon; which thing the said Hunne could never fold nor do after he was hanged. Whereby it appeareth plainly to us all, that the neck of Hunne was broken, and the great plenty of blood was shed before he was hanged.”

  All this notwithstanding, the Church stuck to its guns. In fact, it doubled down and declared Richard Hunne’s corpse a heretic. The Church tried the dead tailor’s body on December 16, found it guilty, and burned it at the stake. This was done either as punishment for heresy, or to prevent a potentially damning murder witness should zombies be real.

  Scandals like this strongly turned the tide of public opinion against the Catholic Church and its clergy. For more than a century, reformers had been decrying the kinds of depravities that made the Hunne case so sensational: mortuaries, indulgences, legal favors granted to the Church, disproportionately brutal punishments, large-scale attempts to exercise control over every aspect of a person’s life from cradle to grave. Religious reformers had come before the sixteenth century, but they all lacked that certain je ne sais quoi to make their regional movements global. Enter the printing press. Curtain up on the Reformation.

  BEFORE MARTIN Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, the printing press was not an ally of religious reformers. During the eighty years since Gutenberg’s press was invented, the Church had used it to print indulgences. These were, in fact, perhaps the first thing Gutenberg ever printed. Indulgences allowed sinners to pay cash in order to avoid severe penances, and in some cases guaranteed salvation from eternal hellfire. One couplet from this period goes, “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings / the soul from purgatory springs.” If purgatory was shooting out sinners like clowns from a circus cannon, Gutenberg’s press was printing off tickets for the ride.