Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel Read online

  DEDICATION

  In memoriam

  Lester Lloyd

  James Robertson

  Master printers

  EPIGRAPH

  For there is nothing hid, which shall not be made manifest: neither was it made secret, but that it may come abroad.

  —THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK, 4:21

  In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

  —WALTER ISAACSON, Steve Jobs: A Biography

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  SPONHEIM ABBEY, GERMANY

  GENESIS

  CHAPTER 1: MAINZ, GERMANY

  CHAPTER 2: MAINZ

  CHAPTER 3: MAINZ

  CHAPTER 4: SPONHEIM ABBEY

  CHAPTER 5: MAINZ

  CHAPTER 6: MAINZ

  CHAPTER 7: MAINZ

  CHAPTER 8: MAINZ

  CHAPTER 9: MAINZ

  CHAPTER 10: MAINZ

  EXODUS

  CHAPTER 1: CALCULATION

  CHAPTER 2: COMPOSITION

  CHAPTER 3: ALCHEMY

  CHAPTER 4: BROTHERHOOD

  CHAPTER 5: SPONHEIM ABBEY

  CHAPTER 6: JOHANNESFIRE

  CHAPTER 7: IMPRESSORIUM

  CHAPTER 8: JOURNEYMEN

  CHAPTER 9: WILDERNESS

  CHAPTER 10: SPONHEIM ABBEY

  NUMBERS

  CHAPTER 1: RETRIBUTION

  CHAPTER 2: APOTHEOSIS

  CHAPTER 3: CRUSADE

  CHAPTER 4: BITTER WATER

  CHAPTER 5: ILLUMINATION

  CHAPTER 6: APPARITIONS

  CHAPTER 7: SPONHEIM ABBEY

  CHAPTER 8: COVENANT

  LETTERS

  CHAPTER 1: SUNDAY BEFORE JOHN THE BAPTIST

  CHAPTER 2: SPONHEIM ABBEY

  CHAPTER 3: MONDAY BEFORE THE TRANSLATION OF SAINT BENEDICT

  CHAPTER 4: SPONHEIM ABBEY

  CHAPTER 5: FRIDAY AFTER THE TRANSLATION OF SAINT BENEDICT

  CHAPTER 6: THURSDAY AFTER SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

  REVELATION

  CHAPTER 1: TUESDAY BEFORE SAINT AUGUSTINE

  CHAPTER 2: SPONHEIM ABBEY

  CHAPTER 3: WEDNESDAY AFTER THE NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

  CHAPTER 4: SPONHEIM ABBEY

  CHAPTER 5: WEDNESDAY AFTER THE NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  SPONHEIM ABBEY, GERMANY

  September 1485

  MANY YEARS AFTERWARD, when Abbot Trithemius first asked him to recall the true beginnings of the glorious art of printing, Peter Schoeffer refused. The story was too private, he informed the abbot, and not really his.

  “Exactly so. No man invents alone! Creation is the Lord’s own province.” The monk, with a wide smile, was pitching toward his guest. “It follows that the man who made this miracle was touched by God.”

  He’s young—too young to be the abbot of this hilltop cloister, master of a vaulted study lined with books whose brass clasps shimmer in the golden autumn light. Nor does Peter Schoeffer like the glint of satisfaction in his eyes. Although he knows why it is there: Trithemius has netted him at last, has drawn the celebrated printer up to his own abbey after many tries.

  “I plan to write it all,” the abbot says, and lifts an arm to circumscribe the library, the thick stone keep, the Rhineland down below. “A chronicle of all that has transpired here in this blessed time. None of more import, surely, than this great invention in which you, sir, played a part.”

  He uses me to make his reputation, Peter thinks. Is this how chronicles are made, the story told to those who’d make their name by those whom time and fate have unaccountably left standing?

  On his way into the abbey he and the abbot wove through courtyards past the chapel, to the open cloister walk where even now the monks sit writing, backs bent, desks positioned to receive the slanting harvest sun. How long it’s been, Peter remarked, surprised, since he has seen a group of Benedictine brothers in such busy, scratching rows. Once every cloister of the great monastic orders had scriptoria where God’s Word flowed from hand to parchment, but hardly any now survive.

  The abbot did not even break his stride. “They curse me for it,” he said with a tight smile, “and protest that the printing press should spare them this hard drudgery.”

  Peter has brought books from his own press to give to Sponheim, mainly standard works of liturgy and law. His thoughts have started turning to the prayers the monks will say in thanks when his soul nears its time. Trithemius receives these printed volumes greedily, though his own shelves are filled with handwork of the scribes. He strokes their leather bindings, and fixes Peter once again with his light, intense eyes.

  “You are the only one who knows the truth, now that both Johanns have been called home to God.”

  Johann Gutenberg, he means, and Johann Fust.

  Peter Schoeffer’s mind is clear, his fingers as strong as they have ever been. He’s over sixty now, a father to four sons, and the wealthy founder of the greatest printing house in all of Germany. A lean, tall man, he wears a close-cropped silver beard on his narrow, sober face.

  “The truth.” He smiles.

  Much has been said in the decades since, but almost none of it is true. They’ve practically canonized the man who found this wondrous art. How Gutenberg would laugh if he could see them from above . . . or else below. The final disposition of the master’s soul is far from certain.

  “They say he died in penury, abandoned and betrayed.” The abbot’s voice turns hard.

  Well Peter Schoeffer knows the charge: that it was he and Fust, his foster father, who wrenched the Bible workshop from the master and robbed him of his whole life’s work. For years he’s borne the slander of this heinous accusation.

  “It is a lie.” His voice is clipped. “He died a member of Archbishop Adolf’s court, highly praised and well attended.”

  “While your own firm went on and prospered.”

  “Success, dear brother, is no crime.” He gives the monk a piercing look. “Betrayals there were, certainly—but not how people think.”

  “Then there’s a tale to tell, indeed.”

  The abbot moves toward the window, where he stays a moment lost in—or feigning—thought. His plain black habit hangs on his large frame like fabric on a birdcage.

  “We have a duty, don’t you think?” Trithemius looks back. “A duty to the past, and to the future?”

  Though more than thirty years have passed, Peter is loath to blacken the master’s name. Deep down, he still must love the madman, Gutenberg, that burning, brutal genius who tore down as much as he created—who took the credit, always, regardless of whether it was due. He conceived the craft and forged the metal letters before anybody else, this none could reasonably deny. But without Peter and his father, that great Bible would never have been made.

  “Think of the ark of history.” The abbot tries a different tack. “Does not the great vault of historia contain all past and present and the whole created world? Is not each word, each action that we take, therefore a part, however small, of the vast architecture of God’s plan?”

  Trithemius has a domed forehead and unblinking eyes. He’s confident, wellborn, without a doubt—and the same age that Peter was when it began, with that same burning drive. Peter searches in the corners of the memory palace in his mind. God’s vault is vaster, and by far: he’s always pictured it a nave that fills the sky.

  He once believed that what they did would lift them higher, e
ver higher—he sensed the godliness that flows throughout Creation brush them. Until it cracked, and their whole workshop filled with anger and recriminations. With each succeeding year Peter has seen the world become unhinged, cacophonous, the very earth stunned by the pounding of machines. And he’s begun to wonder if God did not unleash some darker force with that great shining net of words.

  He’s never wanted to expose the master, not out loud. He’s prayed for years to find forgiveness in his heart. But deep inside he still blames Gutenberg for how it all came crashing down. He scratches at his beard. Trithemius is right. Posterity should know the truth; the world should know the role he and Fust played.

  The abbot sits and reaches for a reed.

  A tool—that’s how the master saw him at the end. Yet which among them is not the Master Craftsman’s tool? Peter feels a sudden lightness, like a bubble rising through a molten mass. He’ll tell it as he can. With modesty, he prays: God knows he’s struggled all his life against the sin of pride.

  “It may take many visits,” he says, rising in his turn and looking out on the fading orchard, the mottled auburn hills that step down to the valley far below.

  Who can say if what they made will prove a force for good or ill? God alone can know. To pretend otherwise is to presume to know His mind. Yet isn’t that just what they did in those few heady years, inflamed by ardor, hubris, youth? Imagined that the three of them with their own newfound art could rise as high?

  “Historia.” He nods. “All right. Perhaps you’ll find a way, where I have not, to spy the meaning that the Lord inscribed.”

  GENESIS

  CHAPTER 1

  MAINZ, GERMANY

  September 1450

  I WAS TWENTY-FIVE the year my father called me home.” So it began. The letter was delivered to the workshop on the rue des Écrivains, where he sat copying some proofs of Aristotle. It did not state the reason why. His father just reached out his merchant’s hand and plucked Peter up, as if he were a number to be transferred from one column to the other in his fat brown ledger. From Paris, back to Mainz: Peter felt the sting of it the whole three days it took to cross the flat French plain and sweep home down the Rhine.

  Stepping on the market boat at Strassburg, he tried to calm his mind—just wipe it clean, the way he’d scrape and chalk a parchment. He’d learned this discipline from monks some years before: to steady first his breath, his pulse, and then his fingers and his eyes, to join the text he copied and his nib in one taut line. At least it was a blessing to escape that stinking, jolting coach. He gripped the railing, filled his lungs, and faced downstream.

  The ship was weighted low with cargo; passengers who had no railing clung to staves nailed to the central hold. They were mere specks upon the river rushing toward the sea. The vessel pitched and rolled, and he could feel the shiver of that mighty force beneath his feet. The river seemed to fling him backward, down, with every bend that hauled him closer to his home.

  When he was young, he’d thought the Rhine ships looked like ladies’ slippers: flat and low along the prow, then rising aft to curl like some outlandish petal at the captain’s back. He’d been a boy the last time he saw these shores. Yet he returned now as a man—a man of letters, a clericus, a scribe. He bore the tools of his profession in a pouch slung like a quiver at his side: the sealed horn of ink, his quills and reeds, his bone and chalk and chamois.

  The valley of the Rhine peeled off to either side in banks of green and gold, and farther up outcroppings rose, perched high above the river like so many gnomes. An ancient peaty smell mingled sickeningly with the pomades and the late-September sweat of bodies crammed together at the rail. All he knew was that the matter was urgent. His father would not have called him back to celebrate the birth of his new son, although a child this late in life was wondrous news. Nor was he likely to have picked Peter a wife. First get yourself established, Johann Fust had always said, and then you’ll have your choice of brides. The only clue lay in a postscript in his looping hand: I’ve met a most amazing man.

  The Seine had smelled of chalk and stone, a sharp and thrilling city striving. The Rhine was wider, darker, rooted in the forest and the field. Peter breathed in its odor, the odor he had known most of his life. They were not far from Gernsheim now, where he’d been born and raised and tended sheep. Where he’d been orphaned, and then saved. Fleetingly he saw the farm, and Father Paul. He never would forget the old priest’s palsied paw, and then his own small fist, tracing out his letters in fulfilment of his mother’s dying wish. He looked down at that very hand clamped now upon the railing—that hand that was the master of a dozen scripts. It was a perfect tool: with it he stood, at the Sorbonne, right at the apex of the world.

  And what a world it was! Even decades later he could taste the feeling of that year of Jubilee. The Holy Roman Empire pulsed like a rich man with a fever, fearful yet exalted at the prospect of the light. All Christendom hung in the balance, waiting. There was a new pope on Saint Peter’s throne, and some strange new spirit rising. The schism of three popes had been laid to rest; the cardinals had bowed at last to the authority of Rome. The new Italian pontiff, Nicholas V, had vowed to sweep the vile world clean. He’d called his Jubilee to bring the faithful back to penitence, and undo years of plunder, ruled by greed.

  That new wind was sweeping through the markets and the lecture halls, the streets and seats of learning from Bologna up to Paris. It licked around the stools where new men labored at their quills, copying the texts that fed the best minds in the western world. That wind had swept in masses of new students, lifted by prosperity and trade, all avid for their chance; it threw the scribes together in long ranks, writing madly to keep up with the demand. He’d felt the force of it up his own arm, lifting his eyes to heights he’d never dreamed, for he was one of these new men, these scholar-scribes.

  And then the wind stalled, stopped short by the thick brown band of the Rhine. Peter watched the other trading boats, as thick as krill upon the water. Merchants, moneylenders, bureaucrats, and priests, all servants of Mammon as much as of God. He knew for certain that the winds of change were dead upon these shores when in the afternoon their boat put in to Speyer. He hung back when the passengers leapt off; he’d spied some merchants friendly with his father he would have to greet if he were seen. Instead he hung about the pilings, watching as the docker swung the crane and dug it deep into the bank.

  He’d brought only what little he could carry, including a new manuscript of Cicero he had just started when the summons came. The rest he’d left behind in Paris as a kind of charm. His father could not mean he had to stay in Mainz. Not after all that Peter had achieved: his rapid rise through the ranks, his luck at being chosen not a month before to represent the workshop to the rector of the university. He wrote these extra books at night, to earn the coins for things his father’s stipend did not cover and he’d rather not reveal. The manuscript, and ten blank sets of pages, he had packed inside a barrel from the family trading firm. Cicero, On Moral Duties. Oh, the parallel was rich: the great man’s lectures to his son. It floated with him now, lashed to the others in the hold, the vellum snug inside its curly nest of shavings.

  At least, that’s where he had last seen it stowed. Until, with shock, he saw his small brown cask tossed up and lashed onto the massive hook that swung the goods to shore. He leapt and shouted, waved his arms. The docker hauled on the rope. The barrel bore the mark of Mainz, he grunted. And no goods could transit in or out of Mainz these past three weeks, since the archbishop slapped the city with the unholy ban.

  “What ban?” His father’s friends were at his back then, breathing sourly. “Leave it,” Widder hissed, “or you will never see it back.” The barrel branded “Brothers Fust” sailed slowly through the sky. “Don’t get much news, I guess, up there in Paris?” An elbow dug into his side. Excommunication was Archbishop Dietrich’s favorite means of brandishing his fist; he would shut a city in his diocese for weeks and sometimes months if l
ocal councils tried to cut into his power or his revenues.

  The captain blew his whistle and the passengers all piled back on, propelling Peter forward on that rank and jostling tide. He was wedged in, hauled back, no better than a shipping cask. Three years he’d been away, by God, and not a bloody thing had changed.

  As they gained speed, he prayed that he might soon escape this spent and feuding place. He bent his body with the current as the river coiled itself past Gernsheim, looped three times like some gigantic spring, then shot the boat that bore him up the few remaining miles.

  The city looked the same. Not battered in the least, though he had heard enough in transit to conclude that Mainz was in extremis. She still stood proud upon the bank, an island girded by a high white wall, tipped red and blue as if by an illuminator’s brush. The ship moved slowly past the vineyards of the abbeys that encroached upon her southern door like fattened bishops. Across the river to the right, a smaller, muddy mouth drained from the Hessian plain. The cathedral city of the archbishopric of Mainz sat just astride the confluence of Rhine and Main.

  The foreshore that late afternoon seemed drained of life. Out of instinct Peter raised his eyes to check the color of the sky. The Iron Gate would soon be shut. The day’s last stream of men and carts was toiling up the rocks, and he scrambled to join in, feet sinking into brackish sand. Up close the mighty wall was flaking, puckered at the massive hinges like a toothless hag. Beneath the arch he kissed his palm and touched it to the city seal. A dogleg left and right, and he was on the square they called the Brand, and home.

  It was strangely quiet as he stood there, tensing and untensing his long hands. Drays waiting for unloading stood before the Kaufhaus, the huge customs hall. Horses stamped, the starlings wheeled, yet over everything there hung a pall. His eyes went to the jerking clock hands on the tallest spire, the red cathedral of St. Martin’s. He waited until they stood in a straight line. They clicked, the mechanism cracking sharply in the silence. No bells. In all those forty churches, he could hear no bells. The archbishop’s ban was just another sharp reminder of who really held the reins, his father’s friends had said. The workingmen had won the city council and tried to halt the years of plunder by the ruling Elder clans. But when the council would not pay the interest that those clans demanded on the sweetheart deals they’d engineered, the old guard simply called in Archbishop Dietrich’s fist. It was the same old litany of greed, the grappling for power in this backwater that history had left behind. Peter turned and struck across the square toward the Haus zur Rosau.