Alix Christie - Gutenberg's Apprentice

Men weep behind a mask, as he well knew. That year he watched his father’s belt grow slack, what hair remained go purely white. Gone was the paunch, the ready smile, the ornamented jacquards: in their place emerged a stranger, hollow-eyed and somber, hand lifted to the heavy crucifix he wore now at his neck.

It wasn’t just this one cruel loss. It was all of a piece, it seemed to Peter: the drying up of trade, the weight of all that Bible debt, the certainty of holy war. The papal bull was tacked up on St. Martin’s portal: the pope required all able-bodied men to muster for Crusade. No soul could hope to be exempt; any who hesitated would be jailed and excommunicated.

Yet Fust had taken this news too with apathy — as he took everything in those dark days. He hardly stirred outside the Kaufhaus, and did not even come to check their progress at the shop. Although it stung him, Peter did his best to understand. His father had buried a child and wife before, and bowed before God’s will — then God had smiled, and brought him Grede and Tina, little Hans. Why then did this loss, after those others, hold such lethal force?

Old Lothar turned to Peter finally, and said his father barely slept, or ate. “Reason with him if you would, young master.” He shook his rutted, faithful head. Peter begged his father to remember that the Lord had spared his wife. She would come back; the only balm for certain wounds was time.

“Don’t speak to me of grace,” was all Fust answered.

The fear of losing her, of losing all — his business, and his books, the freedom of the open road — had wormed its way into his heart. It was as if everything he’d built, and all he’d reached for, was suddenly fragile and in danger of collapse. Always before there’d been an order and a sense, but now the sultan’s hand had throttled his whole livelihood, and God himself had turned His back.

[34.5 quires of 65]

Late November 1453

APAINTER CAME to Mainz that bleak November, traveling as those roving brush-men did from Residenz to monastery, patrician home to ducal hearth. The penning of new manuscripts and painting of their margins still went on, of course. This man, an Austrian, lodged with the painter Pinzler on the Leichhof, Peter heard. Apparently he hoped to get some painting work on the new Bible being written by the monks at St. Viktor’s.

And in the Humbrechthof they had at last hit the halfway mark. They were not far off now from Psalms, which Gutenberg had chosen as the end of the first volume. The text was far too massive to bind in one book; they’d split it into two. So it was time, thought Peter, going to his father and saying it out loud: time now to think about illumination of the copies Fust had planned.

Right at the start, his father told them he had seen it in a dream. He saw a row of printed pages on a trestle, then a brush — a painter coloring a dozen copies with the selfsame leaves, the same bright birds and flowers. Just as Gutenberg had made the text identical, Fust would hire a painter who would decorate the Bible with identical motifs. A few to start, to see how they would sell — then more, if the new men of means were pleased to buy a book complete and ready-made.

The beauty of illumination, if nothing else, had always worked a certain magic in his father’s heart. Peter prayed it might again have this effect. This painter was in competition with the local artists from the Cherry Orchard workshop run by Weydenbach, he said; it was a perfect chance to view the two contrasting styles. Fust, haggard, old now, simply shrugged. He had no interest in the local style. “Though it is plain enough,” he dully added, “whom you would have me hire.”

Pinzler’s sons, Anna’s brothers, worked in that local workshop. Peter saw her jars of unguents and glues, the little curtain to the kitchen and her mother’s loom. “Not necessarily.” He shut the door inside his mind. “It’s up to you.

“Indulge me,” he went on, cajoling. “Let Klaus arrange a viewing.”

Fust cocked his head. Thinner, he resembled Jakob, with his wary and pugnacious look. “So long as Gutenberg is not invited.”

Peter looked at him intently. “I shouldn’t think it would be necessary.”

Fust pursed his lips and nodded. It still rankled, the words they’d had, the costs of that third press, the four new workers — but most of all it was the fear, which Peter shared: the sense that everything now dangled by the slimmest thread.

“A little air,” he said, and gently touched Fust’s elbow. “A little brushwork will do wonders.”

Peter sent a note to Pinzler to arrange it. There might be something in it for the painter too, he wrote. What the man might think of him did not disturb his mind. Nine months ago he’d almost been betrothed — now he was not. The Lord of Hosts determined all: no part of it was really in their human hands. The Book just ran and ran into a smoky distance, dragging him behind it, and the crew. A week before, Mentelin had finished the last pages of Isaiah, the Salvation book. Repent, or face destruction, was its cry. Those without faith will not endure. Peter’s only mission was the driving and the steering of this pounding team: three presses and six setters, trampling through the sinning, bloodstained world. Making the highway straight, he said inside himself: the highway of the Lord.

The Austrian was slight and weather-bitten, with one squinting eye. Klaus Pinzler clasped Fust’s hand and led them to the table, cleared and pushed up to the fire. Markus, Anna’s brother, had her nut-brown hair and a look of cautious query in his eyes. Beside him, she stood. Anna. She looked older. How long, one year — two? — since he had come here that first time? How was it he had come again, what was the Lord’s intent? All things have their season, Peter thought: A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

“Gracious of you, in such weather.” Klaus gave Fust the cushioned chair.

A little flush described an arc along her neck’s left side. Formally, Peter Schoeffer bowed. Markus leaned and spread some quires. “Depending on the job, we’d vary certain shades,” he said, and fanned some pages from that new handwritten Bible.

Peter had told them only that his father sought a painter for a book. He hoped to keep it just that vague — although he almost slipped, himself, right then and there.

The paper of that written Bible was the very same that they were using in the Humbrechthof. The same cream linen with its wavy chain lines and the ox-head watermark, identical — a pointed shape that looked more like a fox’s than an ox’s head. The very same, from the same molds in the same mill along the river Po: discomfort, then suspicion, needled him inside. Sharply he looked at Markus, who was telling Fust that Archbishop Dietrich had commissioned this new Bible; they’d just finished a new psalter for him, too. Petrus Heilant, Peter thought: he was the scribe who ran this Bible job. What were the chances that the paper handler’d talked — made some remark as he was selling the same batch to both the master and the monk? Peter’s skin crawled as he watched the artist’s fingers trace the vibrant colors of the borders. The fact of two big clients in the same small place would be remarkable; he made a note to pry it out of Gutenberg.

The job he had in mind, Fust said, was for half a dozen books, each painted more or less the same. He sat and scrutinized the painted margins. Peter watched him breathe the pigment in, his nostrils flaring, body warming to the beauty and the craft. He saw the way his fingers traced the lines. This was beyond all else what Fust, the merchant, had bequeathed to him, he thought: for all that his foster father was a man of commerce, he had been born and raised a craftsman. He did not lack for finer feeling.