Gutenberg's Apprentice (46 page)

Authors: Alix Christie

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BOOK: Gutenberg's Apprentice

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PETER SCHOEFFER went on to become the world’s first major printer, producing nearly three hundred volumes through the firm of Fust & Schoeffer, including the 1457 Mainz Psalter, widely considered the most beautiful book ever printed. Upon Fust’s death in 1466, Peter married his daughter, Christina, establishing a printing dynasty that spanned four generations. He invented the business of publishing and founded the event known today as the Frankfurt Book Fair, and died in 1503 at the ripe age of nearly eighty.

JOHANN GENSFLEISCH, known as Gutenberg, was immediately recognized as the inventor of printing with movable type. Though he never signed a single printed book, the success of the
Biblia latina
led to another Bible commission from the bishop of Bamberg and to Gutenberg’s appointment in 1465 to the court of the new archbishop of Mainz, Dietrich’s successor. Until his death in 1468, aged about seventy, he is thought to have produced many papal bulls, calendars, and letters of indulgence in consortium with printers including Heinrich Keffer and Berthold Ruppel. His last work was a new type for a religious encyclopedia, the
Catholicon
of Balbus, which it is believed other printers brought to press after his death.

JOHANN FUST prospered as a merchant and publisher, selling the wares of Fust & Schoeffer across western Europe after his partnership with Gutenberg was dissolved in November 1455. While showing a printed Bible in Paris in 1463, he was hounded out by scribes who accused the firm of undercutting normal prices. On a later business trip, he contracted the plague and died in Paris in 1466, aged about sixty-five. Several years later, Peter Schoeffer and Konrad Henkis, Grede’s second husband, donated a copy of the firm’s
Letters of Jerome
to the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris, which pledged to say a mass in perpetuity for Fust.

JAKOB FUST was killed in battle in 1462, when Mainz’s feuding factions descended definitively into civil war. As
Bürgermeiste
r (mayor) he had led the city council in a losing fight over Dietrich’s successor as archbishop. The victor, Adolph of Nassau, swiftly turned the once-free city into a vassal of the archdiocese, stripping the guilds of power and the council of its sovereignty. Many, including the three men who made the first printed Bible, lost homes and businesses. Nassau’s orders were eventually rescinded, and Gutenberg honored as a member of his court, while Fust and Schoeffer reestablished their press at the Haus zum Iseneck on the Brand.

JOHANNES TRITHEMIUS published accounts of his conversations with Peter Schoeffer in two chronicles, the
Chronicon Sponheimense
of circa 1500 and the
Annales Hirsaugienses
of circa 1514. His work
De Laude Scriptorum
(In Praise of Scribes) was printed in Mainz in 1494, presumably by Peter Schoeffer or his son Johann.

POPE NICHOLAS v died in March 1455, and with him any hope for Crusade against the Muslim Turks. No army was ever raised, despite the vehement exhortations of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the former secretary to Kaiser Friedrich III, who was named Pope Pius II in 1458.

The fall of Mainz pushed journeymen who trained in those two rival workshops out as refugees into the wider world. The craft of printing spread like wildfire: within a decade, it was being plied by Johann Mentelin and Heinrich Eggestein in Strassburg, Heinrich Keffer in Bamberg and then Basel, the Bechtermünzes in Eltville—then Johann Neumeister, Berthold Ruppel, Albrecht Pfister, Konrad Sweynheym, and others, the secret knowledge spreading from Germany to Italy and Switzerland and France. Printers set up shop in more than 250 cities between 1450 and 1500, a period known as the time of
incunabula
—the cradle years of printed books.

Forty-eight copies of the Gutenberg Bible still exist, complete or in part, out of the estimated 180 copies made. Some library collections generously cite the makers as “Gutenberg—Schoeffer—Fust?” Most do not. The last time one was auctioned, in 1987, a buyer paid $5.4 million for the Old Testament alone.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel could not have been written without the help of experts whose scholarship and advice were crucial to my understanding of early printing. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Lotte Hellinga, former deputy keeper of the British Library, and Paul Needham, director of the Scheide Library at Princeton University, for their unflagging patience with my queries. Dr. Monika Estermann, editor of the Archive of the History of the Book [
Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens
] in Frankfurt shared invaluable insights, as did Dr. Wolfgang Dobras, director of the Mainz city archive, and Dr. Stephan Füssel, director of the Mainz Institute for Book Studies [
Mainzer Institut für Buchwissenschaft
] at the Johannes-Gutenberg University. Hearty thanks are also due to the staff of the Mainz
Wissenschaftliches Stadtbibliotek
and the librarians at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.

I have drawn on the painstaking research of eminent Gutenberg scholars over half a millennium, although the interpretation of the facts is my own. I relied heavily on Guy Bechtel’s magisterial 1992 study,
Gutenberg: Une Enquete,
and the art historical insights of Dr. Eberhard König, among others. A bibliography of sources and images can be found at
www.gutenbergsapprentice.com.

For most of my life, I have been inspired by formidable masters of the typographic arts. I was fortunate to apprentice as a letterpress printer under the foreman of the former Mackenzie & Harris hot type foundry in San Francisco, the late Lester Lloyd, and to the proprietors of the Yolla Bolly Press in Covelo, California, the late James Robertson and Carolyn Robertson. This book is dedicated to those master printers, who left an indelible impression on me and led me directly to Johann Gutenberg and Peter Schoeffer. Peggy Gotthold and Lawrence Van Velzer of Foolscap Press offered support at every step, along with hand-printed materials for special editions of the novel. Close readers Vonnie Madigan, Katherine Maxfield, and the North London Writers Group contributed enormously, and I have been blessed with exceptional editors in Terry Karten and Marion Donaldson and fantastic agents in Simon Trewin, Dorian Karchmar, and Annemarie Blumenhagen. My mother, sister, and brothers championed this book from the start, but it is my husband and children I owe the deepest thanks, for their love and forbearance during my long trek through the medieval world.
Vivat biblus
.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALIX CHRISTIE
is an author, journalist, and letterpress printer. She apprenticed to two master California printers and owns and operates a 1910 Chandler & Price letterpress. A widely published journalist, she turned to fiction in the 1990s, studying at St. Mary’s College of California, where she earned a masters of fine arts. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
Gutenberg’s Apprentice
is her first novel.

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The title and text of this book are set in Historical Fell Type, a digital revival of one of the oldest book faces cut in England. It was designed by Peter de Walpergen, a Dutch punch-cutter, in the late seventeenth century for John Fell, the bishop of Oxford, and was one of the founding typefaces of the Oxford University Press. The initial capitals in main chapters are Linotype “Like Gutenberg Caps” from the Monotype company. The floriated initials in Sponheim Abbey chapters are facsimiles of illuminated initials in the Yale University Library copy of Johann Gutenberg’s last work, the
Catholicon
of Balbus.

CREDITS

COVER DESIGN BY MILAN BOZIC

COVER ILLUSTRATIONS: “GUTENBERGS ERSTER DRUCK,”

AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © BY KIRSTIN MCKEE

GUTENBERG’S APPRENTICE. Copyright © 2014 by Alix Christie. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Theophilus, excerpt from
On Divers Arts
, reprinted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc.

Woodcut on title page courtesy of Historisches Museum, Frankfurt; photographed by Horst Ziegenfusz

Coat of arms at the end of “Revelation” courtesy of Gutenberg-Museum, Mainz

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christie, Alix.

Gutenberg’s apprentice : a novel / Alix Christie. –First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-06-233601-9 (hardcover) 1. Gutenberg, Johann, 1397?—1468—Fiction. 2. Printing—Germany—History—Fiction. 3. Printers—Fiction. I. Title.

EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN 9780062336033

PS3603.H7523G88 2014

813'.6—dc23