Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie

Author:Alix Christie [Christie, Alix]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Biographical
ISBN: 9781443433853
Google: CDR0AwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0062336010
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2014-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

SPONHEIM ABBEY

Winter 1485

TRITHEMIUS stops Peter there. His voice breaks in, a little squeaky and excited. “You mean to say that it was you? Not Gutenberg? But you who made it work—invented this technique the same as it is used today?” He pitches toward Peter, his quill suspended, pointing like a hound.

“Invention is a big word,” Peter says. A stab at immortality, which Gutenberg had never shied from using. His old apprentice nods. “But yes.” His voice is calm. “It’s fair to say I did invent a key part of the process.”

He holds two fingers up to show the size of that small letter mold. “The matrix, which we struck with punches, that’s the name we gave it.”

The abbot’s head is cocked, his forehead creased. “Yet we have not heard any of this until now.”

“I did not shout it from the rooftops.” Peter smiles a private smile. He had preferred to show his mastery in every book he made; he’d kept his distance from the man who claimed it all and trapped him in his shadow. “The world went on, and then he died, and after that I saw no point in making claims.”

The truth had slumbered his whole life, until this abbot in his cloister called. “But as you say, posterity deserves to know.” Peter clears his throat. He gives the facts, as clear as he can make them, so that this chronicler will set it all correctly down.

“First Gutenberg devised the art of casting letters, using sand, then clay. But we had come, as I have said, to something of an impasse. By then we’d spent a fortune—four thousand guilders, I would guess—yet made hardly any progress, before I found that faster way of casting letters. Our Bible printing changed completely after that.”

It was Peter’s hand that held the mallet. He alone who did it, no one else. And yet he sees now how Gutenberg propelled it, too. He was the kind of man who pushed until things gave, a brute who could extract from them more than they ever thought they had.

That matrix redeemed him, certainly. Peter can still hear the way the master crowed. Oh, he was pleased: he praised him loudly at the time, though not again—not at the end, when it truly counted.

“How did it change things?” Trithemius inquires. He seems deflated in some way: he’s gathered back into himself, busy again with ink and quill.

“It was a major step. From this we jumped right to the caster that a man held in his hand.”

Trithemius just gives him a blank look.

“The apparatus we designed to hold the mold, and cast a single letter at a time. This was the main advance that brought the art up to the stage that it is now.”

They evolved it slowly, over time; he perfected it a few years later with the Frenchman, Jenson. The metal mold itself could just as easily have come from Hans, if Peter had not beaten him to it. None of it sprang to life full-blown.

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