Gutenberg's Apprentice (16 page)

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

These were the words that brought a new world into being.

Peter set them flush against a nothingness; hard against a nonexistent margin he arranged them, floating like the world itself in the great void.

In the beginning God created heaven, and earth.

If the pope, the cardinal, the prior, could not give Gutenberg a text to print, then they would choose and print their own.

This, then, was their true beginning: bitter winter, creeping blue-toed to the ashes, blowing heat out of the humped-up coals. Peter set those first words purely for himself, in the frozen heart of the year when the reaper stalks, culling the weak and sick.

He hung them like a lodestar just above the forge, to remind them of the spark that springs from the Creator, running kindling down the ages straight to us. He set that sentence flush against His boundless grace and inked it with the black of space. And then he pressed its darkened lips on skin and hung it just above his eyes, and knew that this, too, was a kind of genesis.

E
XODUS

CHAPTER 1

CALCULATION

        
February 1452

T
HE PICTURE Peter carries in his head is that of Moses, dark hair streaming as he parts the waters, urging on the tribes. Gutenberg resembled him remarkably that hopeful spring. The master stood apart, his arms outstretched, scooping toward them every kind of good this monumental Bible would require. Peter had to laugh at the way he windmilled his long arms, directing the whole stream into the chute that fed the workshop. “You look just like an abbot at his busy hive.”

“You could do worse than watch Cistercians.” Gutenberg pulled at his beard and smiled.

There was no question of remaining in the Hof zum Gutenberg. They grasped the magnitude this time. Conservatively reckoning, the Bible ran a thousand pages, if not more—five times as long as their aborted missal, forty times the size of the Donatus. That Fust and Gutenberg even entertained the thought revealed how much their backs were to the wall.

They were inspired, enraptured certainly—convinced of their invincibility, thought Peter afterward. This was pure Gutenberg, of course. But on the other hand they didn’t have much choice. The Bible was the only book they could hope to sell in quantity that did not need approval from the church, so long as they adhered to the accepted version. Yet from the start it was a risk in every way—not least the certainty that Dietrich would look askance at laymen operating outside his control. If any of the clergy were to learn of it, they had no doubt Dietrich would swoop in and shut them down.

Their crew then numbered only four—Peter, Hans, Keffer, and Ruppel—and yet the premises the partners looked at were all cavernous and freezing: a granary, more stables, sculleries, the ground floor of a house in town. They settled on the last, a massive dwelling girded by a thick high wall a street away along the Cobblers’ Lane. The press would have to stay behind: it was impossible, the master said, to take it all apart and lug it piece by piece along the street. There was no darkness deep enough to trust, no way to stop prying ears and eyes.

“Once burned, twice shy.” He winked at Hans. “The last time I was fool enough to let my tools out of my sight, we came much closer than a Christian should to robbing graves.” Peter glanced up, amazed. What darkness did he hide? The apprentice tucked that scrap away and vowed to worm it out of Hans.

They left the wood press standing where it was and moved the rest one moonless night across the churchyard of St. Christopher’s, through a gate left almost imperceptibly ajar. The master’s pastor, clearly, was informed. From that black chink between two walls it was no more than a cat’s spring across the street that climbed to St. Quintin’s, into a gloomy courtyard, then to the low door of the Hof zum Humbrecht, its upper stories disappearing in the blackness of the night.

Four steps dropped to the battered earth of a ground floor. Joists the width and girth of a small horse held up the cobwebbed rafters stretching deep into the subfloor of the house. The clay gave off a smell of roots and piss and rats. Chest by bench by bucket, tray by case, they hauled the workshop in. They didn’t smuggle only casting boxes, inks and ores and heavy crates of metal type. They had a giant bellows, too, rigged to a treadle, which any fool would know was meant to fan a forge.

Hans and Keffer fit the forge pipe in the chimney stones; Peter and big Ruppel set two casting stations up, and pried the shutters open to scour out the stench. The place was huge and had a space for every need: the longer, narrow halls for drying; the cavern with the forge where they would cast and run the press; a separate room where they could sit and put their letters into lines. The shapes below were echoes of the rooms in which the men would live just overhead. The master sent for Konrad, back in Strassburg, to build a new press; he would not hire some local cretin who might blab. While waiting they removed the walls that separated room from room in that dim underworld. When it was done, no corner remained safe from his keen eyes, the ceiling held by a stripped forest of dark beams. “The key is speed,” the master said, “efficiency, by God. No wasted step or motion.” It seemed to Peter as he watched him pacing, barking orders left and right, that Gutenberg saw everything from a great height, his raptor eyes pinned to the slightest movement on the ground.

He sent across the city, then the river and the forests and the mountains, for materials. Paper from a mill in Piedmont, vellum out of Swabia, to supplement the stack they had. Ruppel went with him to the Wood Gate to inspect the hardwoods: maple and beech for benches, cases, tables. He commanded coal and candles, ores and oxides. He was a muleteer, he cracked, a blooming drover. Whip-cracker, jack of all trades: polisher of stones, mixer of metal, deviser of devices, maker of machines.

Peter pitched in with his hammer like the rest. Gone was the little brownish lump from writing on his middle finger and the trace of burn on his left hand. He built the letter cases at a slant, then hefted his own letters, thick and heavy as old bones, and laid them in each wooden pocket. Each evening he would stand a moment looking at this massive thing take shape. The naked beams, the half-wrought shop, loomed like the outlines of strange buildings to his eye: half memory-palace, half the vision of God’s City that Saint Augustine described.

The partners worked together in those months as they had never done before, and never would again. In the cave of Peter’s recollection he and Gutenberg and Fust are figures by a constant fire, stooped and sketching, talking and gesticulating at all hours. What had been left of Fust’s eight hundred guilders quickly disappeared into the workshop’s maw; they would need more, much more. They’d make at least a hundred copies of the book; whatever they could get as a deposit from each buyer would bring something in, but even so they wouldn’t see real revenue for several years. They came to a new business understanding, based not on faith but more on risk and its reward—and most of all on cunning. Neither partner harbored much illusion after all that wasted time; each knew precisely where the other stood. It was the firmest ground on which to strike a deal, Fust told his son: either both would win together, or else both would lose.

A new contract was drawn up, witnessed by the pastor of St. Christopher’s, one Heinrich Günther. It did not nullify their first deal of two years before, but simply altered its conditions. Johann Gutenberg still brought the know-how; Johann Fust still brought the gold, and held the workshop as collateral. Except that now new capital was to be raised, a second round, to get this fledgling business off the ground.

Peter’s father too invoked the old adage: Once burned, twice shy. Why should he bear all of the risk while Gutenberg reaped the reward? No longer would he simply play the part of banker. He took an equal share in this, their common and uncommon venture. Fust pledged eight hundred guilders more, and they agreed to split, after expenses, the profits that accrued from what they called, a bit obscurely, to foil spies,
das Werk der B
ü
cher
. The work of the books.

They’d rented the Hof zum Humbrecht from a goldsmith who had moved to Frankfurt. But he still had relations, looping strands of kin all over Mainz. The city was a web of eyes and ears, not just the metalworkers but the butchers, bakers, saddlers, and sawyers, and the keepers of the taverns serving members of those four-and-thirty guilds. Prayer alone would not keep their secret safe.

It was the third time in the master’s life he’d had to hide the work he did behind a smokescreen. In Strassburg he had hid away in an outlying farm, and he had done the same in 1448, when he returned to Mainz. Nobody even guessed for months that he was back, so well dug in was he among the fields by St. Viktor’s. But this time it was different, he said. They had to hide there in plain sight.

He brought the metal dies out to where Peter and his father stood, surveying the new press. “You’d better tell the guild,” he said to Fust, “that your new forge is set on making mirrors.” He wiped the stamps with a clean rag and glanced at Hans and grinned.

“Mirrors,” Fust said, slow to comprehend.

“Pilgrim mirrors. Hundreds of them, thousands.”

These were to cover up the purpose of the lead and tin, the bismuth and antimony, that entered through the cellar door. The Humbrechthof was flanked on one side by a shoemaker whose shingle hung just at the angle of the Quintinstrasse and the Cobblers’ Lane, and on the other by a house whose sole inhabitant was one old man whose relatives just waited for his death to pounce. For all the time they labored there, the printers came and went like rats along the alley behind the row of houses that ended in a cul-de-sac not fifty paces from the market square.

“The tinsmiths will cry foul,” said Peter.

“Not if you have a word with your upstanding brother.” Gutenberg looked hard at Fust. The merchant pursed his lips, eyes flicking back and forth between his partner and the dies.

“Two guilds,” he said. “The smiths and then the gold- and silversmiths, both wanting dues.”

The master raised his outspread hands, as if to ask if they had any choice. He looked acerbically at Fust. “You know as well as I that even silence has a price.”

To that almighty Book each man brought his specific knowledge, which he tipped into creation’s forge. If Gutenberg could grasp and shape the larger whole, then Peter and his father brought more focused skills. Which mines were best for tin and lead, and at what price, which farm the cleanest linseed, which buyers might take paper, and which vellum: all this Fust could provide. Which version of the text to use, which form and shape upon the page: to Peter’s great amazement, Gutenberg deferred to his own expertise in this. And it was that confidence, that unexpected faith in his own skill, that finally brought him back into himself. This was Peter’s place, his path: to hold these alabaster sheets once more between his hands and make of them a meaning.

The Bible had to be a lectern book, of course: large enough for monks to read in the refectory, yet still austere and within any abbot’s means. Reform meant modesty in every way. For buyers they were counting on those abbeys in the Bursfeld congregation, seventy at least. To start, though, they required a model they could copy. The master snorted at the tattered pocket Bible the Franciscans used that Peter had brought back from Paris. Nor was he impressed by Fust’s more ornate books of hours. They had to get their mitts, he said, on one of proper size. To Fust’s look of horror he responded with a barking laugh, “No, not to buy! I mean to steal one with my eyes.”

Instantly the volumes at St. Jakob’s sprang to Peter’s mind. “Brack has the testaments,” he said.

The master tapped his finger at his forehead. “As well announce our business by the crier.”

One might have thought it easy to put hands on a monumental Bible in a place like Mainz. She did not lack for churches or chapels. Yet in those days the only full texts of the Bible were in cloisters, not on pulpits. Here and there a parish had received one as a gift, but these were locked up in their sacristies. Fust’s uncles were both ranking clergy at St. Stephan’s; he would pretend some bookish errand. Peter meanwhile would approach the priest at St. Quintin’s. Before two days were out, though, Gutenberg had beaten both of them. He sauntered in with a huge parcel underneath one arm: the parish Bible of St. Christopher’s, as fat and bulbous as a little dog. “I’ve got the deacon, too, to help correct the pages.”

Fust blanched. “Nobody else.”

“It can’t be helped.”

There was a moment when their eyes locked and the air between them crackled. Then all three bent above that hard brown leather mound.

The master placed a horny thumbnail on a ruby line that marked the ending of one chapter. “A hundred, hundred twenty,” he said, his look somber. “A job enough to print the black.”

They debated for some time how to produce it. Fust said the buyers should receive the plain black printed sheets directly from the press, folded and collected into quires. They then could have them decorated as they pleased, as they would do with any product of the scribes. They’d hire someone to write the running titles on each page, and pen
implicits
and
explicits
and the other ruby lines that marked the sections of the text. In his experience, a duke preferred a different kind of painting to a merchant or to an abbot; each would hire a painter to illuminate the margins, and a binder who would sew and then encase the quires.

“You think of dukes?” the master asked.

Fust smiled. “Why not?” He paused then, looked at Gutenberg through narrowed eyes. “Everything depends upon the quality—and price.”

Gutenberg exhaled. His right hand rose, raked back his hair. “A bloody monster,” he said softly. “Twelve hundred pages, at the least—a hundred thousand pulls upon the bar.”