Gutenberg's Apprentice (17 page)

“If it can sell for less . . .” Fust did not finish.

Balefully, the printer stared down at that hidebound creature. “We’ll have to go like hell,” he said, “or else this beast will have the best of us.”

He taught Peter in that second winter that the art of making was the art of movement. In his relentless mind, all things were reduced to their pure motion. By his ripe age, he’d say, one ought to hope he’d learned a thing or two. The business of any business is stripping away—the cleaner and simpler the better, he would mutter, standing over Peter’s shoulder, watching as he carved and cast. Set your tools for every prospect and prepare: then clean the track and go like Satan’s hounds. “The men are not the vital thing—although I know it’s harsh.”

Though it seemed madness at the time, the master ordered them to add more characters to those they had already made. Scores more: in total they would need nearly 300 different letterforms. Each combination they could possibly conceive, five kinds of
a
, a half dozen
u
’s, exactly like those variations used by scribes. It had to look exactly like a Bible written out by hand, Fust said, or they would have no prayer of buyers. This way, as well, they’d have the letter that they needed at their fingertips each time. And then they’d have to cast scores more of every character, so they could set up three full pages at a time; each Bible page was twice the size of any missal.

To help them set them into lines, the master dreamed up little trays of wood for them to hold in their left palms, while their right fingers roamed the typecase to search out the letter. He had them switch from sand to clay inside the casting box, once he had seen how many letters they would need. Though clay too held for just one casting, it was far faster to prepare than sand.

They set the start of Saint Jerome’s prologue to the Bible in that dark, tight face that Peter had designed for their aborted missal. They laid it out in double columns in the strict proportions of the golden section: five thumbs across, eight down. The type made forty lines in two black towers down the page, with room between for vines, the curling tails of great initials. Gutenberg and Fust were more than pleased.

Then Peter did the reckoning. The first page they had set had taken fifteen hours.

“Thus can we judge,” the master said, “the weeks and months—”

“—and years—”

“—ahead.”

Quailing, Peter counted it once more. Sixty-six quires this Holy Book would make, approximately fourteen hundred pages.

“A quire a fortnight,” said the master, twisting at his beard.

Fust was more gimlet-eyed. “More like a quire each moon.”

Twelve quires a year were five years and a half.
Dear Lord.

Protect us, in Thy wisdom; keep us from all harm.

Grede came once to the new workshop to “inspect all this commotion,” as she put it. It must have been late winter; Peter remembers her in furs. Her husband guided her around the letter cases, one hand planted firmly at her back. She brought to mind an otter, with the sleekness of her muskrat cape, her winter cap of fox. She moved as smoothly too, her fingers roving over parchment, pigments, pots of varnishes and resins. The men were struck entirely dumb. The master barely touched her outstretched hand, as if it burned. He made an awkward bow, retreated stiffly to his elevated table. Peter laughed inside, to see the way a woman could reduce their swagger to the rictus of such smiles.

She marveled at each piece of joinery, the punches and the letters that cascaded from the casting box. “Ingenious,” she murmured, staring fascinated at the press. She walked around it, eyeing it from every side. Konrad had built it sturdier this time, with tapered handles on the weighty carriage to preserve the pressman’s hands. It looked a little like a palanquin, she said, or else a bier. “Praise God, pray not,” Fust said and crossed himself. Death writhed beneath the gates and crept inside the city that whole year. In early Lent the plague had reappeared in livid spots and rattling coughs among the farmers first, then striking indiscriminately, highborn or low, not caring if its victims pushed a cart or rode a carriage. Veils covered the few faces on the streets; they shrank in doorways every time a stretcher passed, borne to the hospice of the Holy Ghost, returning laden with another corpse bound for the Kästrich graveyard. If fear of Gutenberg did not suffice to hold the men inside the shop at night, the stench and groans and terror of contagion did.

Grede ran her hands across the stacks of hides; she flicked and tested both the sizing and the weight of the new vellum. Even married, she was still a furrier’s daughter. For years she’d mended tears in manuscripts that Fust procured with tiny stitches to erase the blemishes. Now she raised one skin up to the light and
tsk
ed. The master watched, lips twitching, as she turned to Peter. “They ought to tan the man who did this. Another rubbing, don’t you think?” Behind her Peter saw the master frown and turn away. Gutenberg could never take a criticism from a man, much less a woman. Yet Grede was right. The calfskin could have used another pass.

No sooner had she gathered up her skirts and left than Keffer gave a hoot. “A young and juicy wife has brother Fust!”

“Retract your tongue, you clod.” Hans flung a hand toward the forge and screwed the magnifier back into his eye. The big smith was still grinning as he strolled away.

“Frau Fust, might I remind you, is a lady.” Gutenberg moved like a panther when he had a mind to. “As such we’ll have no leering and no lust—and by the saints, no bloody contact.” He looked at Peter then, thin lips drawn in a jaundiced smile. “Except for Peter, the poor sod. He hasn’t got the choice.”

Hans rolled his eyes but did not comment.

“You never had a mother, sir?” said Peter, smiling.

“We all slopped out of Eve. You know the good that brought.”

“Humanity, perhaps?” He said it teasingly.

Gutenberg gave a loud snort. “Woman!” he said. “‘More bitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare.’ Ecclesiastes.”

“‘Strength and beauty are her clothing, and she shall laugh in the latter day.’” Peter crossed his arms. “Proverbs.”

On even Ruppel’s stony face he caught a faint trace of amusement.

“Eve, Pandora, Magdalene. Go read your Greeks and scripture.” The master’s face was puckered as if he’d eaten something sour. “You mark my words, young man: a woman will destroy the best a man can be.”

He turned and walked, chin up, toward his desk. Peter watched that haughty, ramrod back. What had poor woman done, to be so calumnied? Strange way he had of showing Christian love. Peter thought of Grede, and Fust’s first wife, Elisabeth, and Céline who sold her father’s paintings by the Seine—each just as quick of hand and eye as any man. The early guilds were filled with women—weavers, painters, carvers, even. Everywhere—from Bruges to Louvain, Venice, Paris. What had she done, to man and more particularly to Gutenberg, to make her such an object of his hate? Peter glanced at Hans. Another mystery that one day, after several pints, he would extract from the old man.

CHAPTER 2

COMPOSITION

        
March
–
May 1452

I
T WAS DARK when Peter stepped into the workshop every morning, dark each evening when he left. He wondered sometimes if the day had ever even been. While Keffer and the master cast, he and Hans practiced setting type. Each typecase was a slanted wooden labyrinth he had to look at first to find the letter he required. But bit by bit the lay of those three hundred pockets graved their places in his mind. The pages they were using as their manuscript were clipped onto a stand before his eyes. He and Hans would sound the letters as they groped, and Peter’s heart was glad at that low mumbling hum that he had missed from the scriptorium.

There was an art to it, he found to his surprise; it was not rote, as he had once believed. His right hand held each option in its grasp, as with his pen. He chose which of the different forms to use, which ligature to shorten or expand a word. Each line required a certain spacing to achieve a perfect weight: he’d set some lines, then have them proofed, then move a space, exchange a letterform, and proof and look again. It troubled him, at first, to think that in this way he might achieve a perfect line. Was man not flawed, by definition? And who was Peter to imagine they might reach for more? And yet the lines, when he composed them, were magnificently balanced. This, too, in his own mind, a proof of God’s intention, and the holy mission they fulfilled.

Above all he found unexpected joy in working hand in hand among those craftsmen. He’d never worked that way before: for all that scribes worked side by side, their lines were singularly theirs. But in the Humbrechthof, he found himself a link in a much larger chain. He’d carry his full tray to the composing stone, and hold the lines as Keffer tied the
forme
. Then Keffer in his turn would heft it toward Ruppel at the press; they’d ink it, pull the proof, and pass it back to Peter. They did not banter much; there was no need. There was a pleasure and a rhythm in the work itself that took the place of words.

It struck him only afterward that this was Gutenberg’s most lasting gift. The man had faith—and fire and ruthless expectation—that they would bring to it the best they had. This faith was harsh, demanding, unrelenting, and it pushed them far beyond themselves. He worked beside them much of that first year, no better and no worse, their work implicitly a piece with his own brilliance. If afterward they were appalled at how he viewed them, there was a kind of fairness in that cold assessment: all men were equal before Gutenberg, and God.

Peter did not know then just how precious were those weeks and months. It felt as though they tossed a rope ahead and hauled the whole thing sweating forward. Sometimes he fancied he could see the very operation in the smolder of the master’s eyes: fixed on some distant spot, Gutenberg would cast his thought out far before him, straining toward the spot where it would land. For once Peter dared to hope that his own stubborn striving too might finally be recognized—not mocked, as it so often had been in his life.

That hope was answered suddenly one day in early May. He was sitting, staring at the shape of those two columns on the page. He thought he knew the skills he had, his limits—when to his amazement he was gifted with a vision that exceeded, and by far, his own mind’s reach.

The frayed edge of both those right-hand margins had disturbed him from the start. They were uneven: some lines ended short and others were too long, and broken by a hyphen. A sloppy, ragged edge was the result. He was staring, irritated, at it when suddenly he saw: in one swift stroke the hand of God just pushed the birdlike scratches of the punctuation to the right, leaving a crisp and perfect margin. Peter saw how easy it would be. A miracle, indeed—of pure mechanics.

Excitedly he went to Ruppel. Build me a wider type-stick, man, he said, an
m
’s width broader than our column. Ruppel scratched his head, but did it. Peter set a dozen lines in something like a frenzy, lining each precisely up to end at the same spot. When necessary he dropped a hyphen or a stop into the extra space beyond the margin. He took the tray back to the press and waited for the inking and the grinding and the proof. And then he knew.

It was perfect. Absolutely perfect: more exquisite than the dream of any scribe. The block was sharp, perfectly squared: the punctuation floated softly in the margin, brushing like the lashes of a bashful bride.

Until that day, his father had just seen the press as a much faster set of hands. The master, for his part, was driven by a vision of that never-ending replication, making many from the one. That evening, when he showed them both, they grasped that this was much, much more.

“No scribe can rival this, for evenness and strength,” said Peter.

Gutenberg was staring fascinated at the page. “I guess the geese will be relieved,” he cracked, “to keep their quills.”

Fust placed the printed sheet beside a manuscript he’d recently commissioned. “What need for
clerici
, indeed.” Their letter was much darker than the written words; the text block was much sharper, more defined. Peter’s father pursed his lips, then dropped his finger on one red-inked line. “Why can’t we do the red as well, then? And put the rubricator out of work?”

Peter looked at Gutenberg. By then they had a way of speaking without words. Two craftsmen, silently assessing a technique:
If the lines are movable, changeable.
Gutenberg was nodding, dark eyes ratcheting between the printed and the written sheets.
If we can add, subtract, the elements at will.
He put a hand upon the merchant’s shoulder as his mouth began to widen in a grin. “By God. Why not?”

“If you can put a line in, you can take it out,” said Peter slowly. “We could print it later with a different ink.”

He pictured it, the miracle of all those lines that scribes would letter in bright red to mark a difference from the text:
Here starts the book of Job
;
Here ends the prologue of the Four Evangelists
. Those lines just lifted out—removed, invisibly, so that they wouldn’t print in black. And then—he tried to see how it would work—each line dropped back, alone, a solitary thing that they would somehow ink in red.

“Just run it by itself.” The master looked with glinting eyes at his apprentice. “A second pass on the same sheet.” He grinned and shook his hoary head. “You’re seeing now the way I see.”

A startled laugh burst out of Fust. “We can remove the hand of man!” His eyes were wide. “Replace the hand of man!”

Gutenberg looked up toward a point on the dark beams. “The symmetries of metal, now of space.” His smile was wide. “The Lord alone knows where it will end.”

By Easter half the type was fashioned, and they’d made good progress in the cutting of the skins. One evening not long after, Fust asked his son to see him once the household had retired. His father stood outside in the small courtyard, drinking in the breath of spring. His mood was ebullient: his merchant’s sap rose every year with the greening of the buds and the thawing of the Alpen passes. Peter took the cup he offered and asked where he was headed first.