“We had a good ride there, by God. We didn’t hide away like here.” The master was admitted everywhere: not just into the noble houses but the craftsmen’s lodges. He’d been respected and praised, much more than in the city of his birth. He didn’t give a rat’s ass for the Mainzers’ clannishness, their snobbishness.
Which did make you wonder, Peter said, why he’d come back.
“Inheritance. This house.” Hans looked balefully at the bleak, soot-streaked walls of their confinement. “His mother left it to him and to his late brother, Friele.” Besides, those foaming Armagnacs had Strassburg in their sights—it was a panic, Hans said, knowing that the mercenary army was a day or two away after having raped and pillaged half Alsace. The master paid his share to buttress the defenses, but he didn’t wait around. “We hot-footed it, believe you me.” The old smith grinned. “To him this house in Mainz was providence.”
Lent came late that year, halfway through March. It was a lucky thing, for otherwise the Main would have been frozen and the merchants forced to travel overland to Frankfurt for Lenten Fair. Fust sailed away, but Gutenberg remained, although they knew the Elders claimed the payments on their bonds two times a year, at autumn and at Lenten Fair. He must have sent a proxy, Peter thought, as he went to the Schreibhaus to see Petrus Heilant. The Elders still collected interest on the loans they’d made to Frankfurt, Speyer, Worms—though only half on every guilder that Mainz owed. This was the deal that Dietrich had exacted in exchange for lifting off the ban: he’d bailed the city out in part—and in return had kept immunity from tax.
The staleness of the air inside the clergy’s meetinghouse disgusted Peter more and more. Or maybe it was just the act of begging that disturbed him every time he stooped to enter the low portal. Heilant was blandly reassuring that a break would come in time, but precious little seemed to come from this. In the depths of that cold penitential season, Peter felt the hope begin to leach out of his bones.
He told himself each letter punch was one more link he broke in the thick chain that anchored him to Mainz. He’d add one to the pile; another shattered link would drop. He’d asked for his own workshop key so he could work at night. If he could pick the pace up, he might finish by midsummer and be off.
One evening a few weeks after Easter he was working late, taking advantage of the light. Spring had come at last, and with it the sweet lengthening of days. The men had gone upstairs, the master back across the courtyard. Gutenberg appeared to find it unremarkable that Peter chose to work on his own time. He must have thought that his apprentice drove himself the way he did—or so his brief, distracted nods conveyed.
Peter lit two candles to chase any shadow from the metal in the vise. He lost himself in concentration. Some time later—one hour, two—he heard a door close, quick steps, then the workshop door heave open. The light had gone, he saw as he looked up. The master crossed toward the workbench and started rummaging among the tools. He took a blade and then came over to where Peter labored.
“Night work.” He snorted. “The guild would stop it, if they ever got their nose in.”
Peter nodded, looked back down.
“It isn’t any of their bloody business.” The master’s face was waxy in the dimness; he held a book clamped underneath one elbow.
“No.” Peter looked back up, surprised. Gutenberg had been a guildsman, ex officio; Hans had said so.
“Time and tide waiteth not.” The master stood there, lost in thought. And then he shook himself and lifted a finished punch that lay at Peter’s elbow. “What, six weeks? Thereabouts?”
The end at last was in their sight. Again Peter nodded.
“Ligatures tomorrow, then,” said Gutenberg, half to himself.
The main alphabets were done; the master had ordered Konrad to build trays to hold the letters, certain pockets made larger for the characters they’d need in great abundance. There was a rigor to that logic even Peter could admire. There were no rules when Gutenberg set out: he’d cobbled everything from what he knew of smithy, weavery, scriptorium. He’d had them knock together slanted racks to hold those letter cases, wooden trays to hold the finished lines and pages. It was the brilliance of that mind to see a thing—a person too—in pieces, Peter thought. Efficiency and speed, he always said: no step or motion should be wasted.
“Brack will have the text to set in a few days.” The master set the punch back down and fingered his long beard.
Peter stretched his aching hands. “He knows how you will do it?”
“More or less.” The smile was sly.
“You must know him then, to trust him.”
“I know them all, to my everlasting sorrow.” Gutenberg smiled cagily. “Far better, luckily, than they know me.”
“I understood that you had studied, too, in Erfurt.”
“An age ago.” He shrugged. “Half the city did; the other half just wanted to be priests.”
Peter allowed himself a smile. “I found the same among the scribes.”
“All angling for the teat.” Gutenberg made a face. “Though there are some worth heeding.” He pulled out the book he was holding. “This one knows ten times more of metal than the guild.”
Peter looked down at the curling hide.
“I thought you ought to read it.”
The inside leaves were soft as suede, and spattered from long use.
“On Divers Arts. By Theophilus. You only need book three.” Gutenberg leaned over him and started flipping through the pages. “Everything I know I got from Hans—and this.”
Chapter heads flashed past: Workshop. Forge. Bellows. Chisels. Punches. Chalice-making. Soldering. Repoussé. Refining Copper, Silver, Brass. Strange lessons for a scribe. Peter murmured his thanks.
“I’ll need it back.” The master turned. “But you can copy out the pages for yourself.”
By Pentecost they’d cast enough of the new letters to begin to fit them into words. Afterward it seemed to Peter that the timing was remarkable. The day before, the parishes had celebrated the arrival of the Holy Ghost, that rushing wind that swept on Christ’s disciples, searing all their foreheads with bright flame. It would be blasphemy to think that what seized the scribe that day was any way akin. And yet, and yet . . . at twenty-five, he did feel grazed—by a brief spark, the most fleeting of breezes.
They’d had only their smoke proofs until then; they did not know how well the types would really print. It was the master who suggested that Peter take the new black ink and choose the lines to set and pull as a first proof. This ink was also Gutenberg’s invention: darker than the plant-based ink used by scribes. He boiled linseed oil to varnish, added lampblack and a pinch of carbonate of lead. This made a sticky, tarlike paste that could be slathered on the letters and then smoothed to an even film.
It startled Peter, hearing the master say that he was owed the honor of composing those first lines. But then Gutenberg did understand paternity—the pride of bringing forth a thing entirely new. Peter tipped his cap to him by setting words from Theophilus, Benedictine craftsman:
Therefore, act now, prudent man, . . . by whose labor and zeal so many burnt offerings are being shown to God. Henceforth be fired with greater ingenuity: with all the striving of your mind hasten to complete whatever is still lacking in the house of the Lord.
Keffer showed him how to tie the lines into a block he called a forme and slide the whole thing on a tray. Peter carried the full slab aloft as though it were an offering, and set it gingerly upon the bed of Konrad’s press. He took the leather balls that they had dubbed “dog’s tongues” in either fist and smeared each with the inky paste, then rolled them on the stone to spread the ink that he applied onto the type with care.
There was a fair amount of joshing as he laid a dampened paper on the glistening lines. It took a man, not a monk, a bull and not a saint, that sort of thing. “Then lend a hand,” he said. One blond giant and one red put beefy mitts upon the bed and helped him push it underneath the hanging platen
.
The lever he would pull alone. It almost was past Peter’s strength, but in that instant he was lifted up in every sense that he could name. His feet came partway off the floor, and the blood rushed to his neck as he heard first the weight drop, then a grinding sound as it made contact with the letters.
“Fiat imprimere!” the master cried, and they hauled back the bed. Peter opened up the wooden frame. Carefully he peeled off the sheet, as the others stepped back to a respectful distance.
A power surged out of those words, a strength that even Peter had not pictured. The ink was as black as heaven’s vault, the letters sharp and gripping. They wove into a trellis just as Pliny said all lines must do, to hold the meaning of the text like wires among the vines. The Word is as a fruit, he thought; the vineyard of the text is thickly twined. He stared, transfixed. In their austerity and density, the letters made a page of extraordinary beauty. His letters—his!—the very lines he’d drawn and carved, now lay proudly, blackly, making words up on the page. He felt his insides quicken with the thrill of it—and then a kind of falling.
Gutenberg was fairly hopping just behind him. Peter felt his energy and eagerness, and from the corner of his eye he saw him reaching. Peter held the page out to him, his fingers grazing the deep bite the words had taken in it.
“By God!” The master’s face was open, softened, every trace of sharpness gone. “A scribe, my eye! A bloody carving genius, more like! From here on out you sculpt my types.”
That was the moment it all changed. Peter saw it clearly at the time. There are in every life some moments that stand out, as if embossed—moments when a man can sense the hand of God. That day, for the first time, the scribe asked—first in shock, then gradually with disbelief, and bashful, dread-filled pride—if what His servant Peter did there, in the Hof zum Gutenberg, might be in fact what He intended.
This was the spark, the breeze, that entered him—the understanding, too, that all the ways he knew were coming to an end. None of the arts he’d learned could remain unchanged. None of the ways of his fathers and their fathers, the familiar rhythms of their lives, would be the same. The genie was released from the bottle. Ars impressoria, known ever after as the ars divin. Peter watched the master take the sheet and hand it off to Hans, and heard his triumphant words: “Fetch Fust.”
His fellows—Hans and Keffer and Konrad, bound now in wonder and in pride—were clustered close together with the master, staring down. Gutenberg looked up and smiled. “By the will of the most Holy Father, we have been delivered,” he said, with a look no less amazed than that of his whole crew.
“Amen,” said Hans, and, turning toward the young apprentice, raised his hands and clapped.
CHAPTER 9
MAINZ
June–September 1451
PETER’S FATHER did not hide his satisfaction with the script, and by extension with the hand that moved his own dreams that much closer. The name days of his sons fell close together in late June—Johannes, John the Baptist, and then the feast day of Saint Peter. Little Hans, at one, could only gum his polished tusk, but Peter could read easily the message in the rosewood box Fust gave him. It had compartments lined in silk the exact length of quills. He had been hasty and too commandeering, Fust conceded as he placed it into Peter’s hands. These metal types are born of writing: there will never be a time when hands are not our first, most sacred tools.
The knotted fustus of their house was inlaid on the top in repoussé of silver from the family shop. “The race is not to the swift,” Peter answered, bowing. He had been hasty too. There were many ways to spread the light of learning, after all. Then there was peace and reconciliation and feasting in the Haus zur Rosau.
Almost a year had burned away since he’d been summoned back from Paris. In the workshop all the type was done, the preparations for the printing of the missal made. The text they were to set, however, had not yet arrived. The prior of St. Jakob’s begged their patience and their faith. July passed in stupefying heat, but still his text did not appear. The crew made grammars to bring in coin and pass the time. The master started sending Lorenz to the monastery on the hill to fetch the first few pages, but every time the servant brought back the same answer.
“Patience!” Gutenberg would snort. “A vice and not a virtue in my book.”
On August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, Peter caught a glimpse of Petrus Heilant, his old classmate, at the portal of St. Martin’s. He had not heard from him for quite some time, but neither had Peter sought him out. The farmers and the monks and sisters from the cloisters on the land had all arrived in carts and long processions, draining through the gates toward the market square. The feast was new, reminding all the faithful that they shared in Christ’s divinity as it had been revealed upon the Mount. More like a chance to make another grab at the collection plate, his uncle Jakob had observed. The monks of St. Viktor’s stood sweating in the unforgiving sun. Heilant looked quite ill, all pink and twitching in his thick black habit. Peter caught his eye; the monk held up his hands and mimed them empty. It hit Peter then with certainty: whatever post there was to pluck, Heilant sure as Satan would have snatched it first. Peter smiled and turned away, humbled yet relieved by his own slipshod calculation.
And in the shop they kept on printing those sad grammars, cursing as the heat intensified. The parchment curled before they got it near the press; the ink just melted to a slop that left the letters thin and blotched. Konrad by then had gone back home to Strassburg, leaving Hans bereft. Ruppel, the new man who ran the press, was taciturn, which did not help. Keffer muttered curses when the master ordered them to work at odd, inhuman hours to beat the heat: before the dawn and through the night, eyes gritty and their weary bones begging for their beds.
All through August Gutenberg just stalked, twisting at that sorry rope he called a beard. If in the spring he had been civil, even friendly, now the crew were just as stupid as they’d been before: cockups and dogsbodies, laggards, useless whelps. The prior didn’t fare much better. “Light a fire beneath your bloody habit,” he would mutter as he reviewed the sketches and the calculations for the missal Peter had prepared.
His apprentice reckoned they’d spent more than half Fust’s gold already. Four or five hundred guilders had gone out on paper, vellum, lampblack, resin, ores and wood and candles, not to mention food and housing for the men. Everything stood ready for St. Jakob’s missal: a hundred sets of royal sheets were trimmed, the letters made. The harvest moon rose and waxed and waned, but still they had received no text to set. Fust and Gutenberg vanished into the master’s study with the ledger, emerging after sounds of argument with mouths turned down. “Another month,” said Gutenberg; “Not a day more,” growled Fust.
Out in the city there were signs of the great mustering to come. Mainz was next to be instructed in the pope’s great mission of reform. His special envoy, Nicholas of Cusa, known as Cardinal Cusanus, had called a diocesan meeting to explain the edicts that the cardinals had passed in Basel. Even in the Hof zum Gutenberg they heard the rustle of the clergy coming. They swooped in like winged beetles, brown and black, the leaders of the seventeen thousand priests in the archdiocese—from Freiburg in the west to Thuringia and Franken in the east and south as far as Baden. At least the visit might shake loose the text from Prior Brack, Fust said. Gutenberg thought just the same: he seized a pen and wrote a note and sent Lorenz back up the hill. For hours he waited on his stool, his eyebrows twitching like a cat parked at a wainscot.
When his servant finally brought the monk’s reply, the master seized the scroll and cracked the seal. His face alone destroyed all hope. He stormed away without a word; it fell to Fust to extract and then to share the truth.
Archbishop Dietrich had indeed endorsed the prior’s version of the liber ordinarius. That draft in fact was long since done. But—here the but—apparently there was a second and competing text; there was dissension in the ranks over the prior’s vision of reform. His Grace the cardin
al, Cusanus, quite naturally would have to choose.
Fust looked hard across the crew toward his son. His rigid face spoke volumes. He’d trusted Gutenberg—they all had, to a man. For months the master had assured them that the text was coming; not once had the inventor shown the slightest doubt. “Our missal,” he had even called it. And now they stood there, pants down, holding out their hands, as Dietrich covered his backside. Gutenberg himself had left the room.
Fust saddled up and left the first week of October, more to stop him ranting, Peter knew, than out of any appetite for sales. Eight hundred guilders he had riding on this missal, nearly all of it tied up in heaps of type and stacks of vellum. Peter meanwhile racked his brain. There had to be some way to move the project on. It came to him one morning as he stared up toward St. Jakob’s from the rampart wall. They’d have to set some of the missal text in their new type, to give the monks—perhaps Cusanus, too—a taste, he told the master. Just beg a page or two, that’s all, and let them see how fine this thing will be. Gutenberg at first did not respond. His mood was fouler then than even Hans had seen it—until a few days later, when abruptly he told Peter to grab cloak and hat and climb the hill with him to see this Prior Brack.
The way to St. Jakob’s lay directly south. But they were forced to leave the city by crabbed routes around the markets and great houses. The master strode so quickly that Peter lost sight of him a time or two among the jostling passersby and carts. He would have lost him utterly, had Gutenberg not stood a head above the rest, and worn a bright red fur-trimmed cap. He slowed as they came out behind St. Martin’s to the painting workshops and the street began to flow more broadly toward the gate. Some paces on, the hatters seized upon him, crying “Fine sir! A muskrat, or an otter, that’s a better top to wear in such a season!” He laughed and dodged and doffed his own. Peter pulled his stole up tight. They passed beneath the gate and crossed a stream that chattered blithely in the cold. They were the only ones that afternoon that went not into Mainz, but out.
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