Matthew Skelton: Endymion Spring

Duck was giggling.

"Don't listen to your mother," said Christopher Winters privately as Blake followed him down the library steps. "There's a fascinating story that a devil once traveled to Oxford with a strange book of knowledge on his back. I think this could be…"

It was another unseasonably warm day and they decided to take the long way home.

That night, as he was preparing for bed, Blake heard a soft scratching sound outside the house on Millstone Lane . He rushed to the door and looked out.

A bright yellow package lay on the front step: Duck's raincoat. Its sleeves were neatly folded across its chest, but the body was filthy and smeared with dirt after her exertions in the library. Blake wondered if she would ever wear it again. He doubted it.

He scanned the dark, frosty street for a sign of Psalmanazar or his dog, but they were nowhere to be seen. He longed to speak to the man about everything that had happened. Quickly, he picked up the coat and closed the door.

Wrapped inside the sleeves was another object — a book. Blake unfolded them, his heart beginning to pound. Endymion Spring was there, still sealed with his crusty patch of blood. His injured finger, cocooned in gauze, throbbed with the memory.

Carefully, he stroked the leather cover. It didn't look like much, but the book contained the secrets to the whole world. He wasn't sure that he wanted it back in his life — the thought of all it enclosed frightened him — and yet the same exhilarating shudder passed through his skin when he touched it, as though the book were meant exclusively for him.

For the first time, he believed he truly understood his part in the riddle. He was the sun the book kept referring to: the son of two seasons, Christopher Winters and Juliet Somers, temporarily divided and now reunited again. Individually, they knew parts of Endymion Spring 's story — and together, the whole.

He could hear them now, sitting side by side in the lounge, reliving their Oxford days. They weren't talking as much as he had hoped, but there was a different kind of silence between them: a more hopeful one. Blake was beginning to feel more optimistic about the future.

Everything was working out fine, exactly as the first riddle had told him it would. The Order of Things will last forever….

Blake glanced down again at the scuffed leather volume. What more could it tell him?

Almost at his bidding, the solitary clasp came undone and the seal of blood disintegrated like red powder before his eyes. The pages began to flicker. Blake's heart leaped with excitement.

Quickly, he checked on his parents, saw that he was not needed and scrambled up the stairs. "I'm going to bed," he called out hastily, and bolted to his bedroom. He slammed the door behind him.

Then, in the privacy of his own room, face to face with the book, he sat down on his bed and considered the Last Book more carefully. Endymion Spring . The name seemed so familiar to him now, like a friend.

Very slowly, he opened the cover….

The book you are now holding took on a life of its own when a good friend asked me an all-important question: "Who was Endymion Spring?" Until then, Endymion had been "more of a shadow than an actual person, a whisper rather than a voice." I decided to scour the stacks of the Bodleian Library to find out. What I learned next amazed me.

In a crumbly old volume from the sixteenth century, I discovered a long-forgotten secret: the true father of the printing press was not Johann Gutenberg, as most people believe, but Laurens Coster, a Dutch woodblock cutter who chanced upon a magnificent beech tree while walking in a wood near Haarlem. To please his grandchildren, he carved some letters from the bark. When he got home, he discovered that the sap from the blocks had bled into the handkerchief they were wrapped in and left a trace of his handmade alphabet behind. The stain gave him an idea: why not print books using movable pieces of wooden type?

Unfortunately, there was a thief in his midst. On Christmas Eve, while Coster attended Mass, someone broke into his workshop, stole his materials and fled to Mainz, where the felon conspired to set up the "first" printing press with Gohann Gutenberg, a talented goldsmith who chose to cast the type from metal, not wood — a decision that would change the world. The culprit was none other than "Johann Fust."

My pulse started racing. Was this true? I quickly turned to another book, which told a different story. No, Johann Fust was not a thief, but a shrewd businessman who invested a large amount of money in Gutenberg's press. He then dissolved his partnership with the inventor just before the Bible could recoup its costs, sued the man for all he was owed and was awarded the rights to the printer's equipment (as well as the Bible), effectively putting him out of business. Gutenberg disappeared into relative obscurity while Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer, spread their names far and wide across Europe…

I turned to another, darker volume. No, Fust was actually "Faust": the German magician who sold his soul to the Devil for all the knowledge and experience in the world. For centuries, the tale inspired many works of literature, including Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588), and led to a false belief that the press had diabolical origins…

How could there be so many interpretations of the past, so many cases of theft and deception? I picked up another book — a moldering volume by an eighteenth-century printer, Prosper Marchand — but it was riddle with footnotes that clarified nothing and I hastily discarded it. Then I came across a compelling account of the printing press by a mysterious man who had hoodwinked London society into believing he was an exile of a far-off country: "George Psalmanazar." He even spoke a made-up language. Could his version of events be trusted?

I delved further into the stacks, poring over each shelf, reading books at random. And yet there was a voice deep inside me quietly insisting that there was something I wasn't quite seeing, some secret that would bring all of these stories together. And that's when I noticed the curious hunchbacked figure on the Gutenberg coat of arms, the peculiar yellow-clad figure that no one has ever been able to explain…I opened my notebook. I suddenly knew the answer to that crucial question. Almost immediately, as if by magic, words started appearing on a blank sheet of paper.