The rare book dealer Stephan Lowenthiel successfully bid for an eight-page Book of Esther from the Gutenberg Bible earlier this month at Sotheby’s in New York. Against two other bidders, he paid a hammer price of $800,000 for this piece put up for auction by the Jewish Theological Seminary. In London last week, at a conference on preserving mankind’s written heritage, he told me why.

This “Noble Fragment” of eight pages, part of a copy originally from Trier in Germany that was broken up and sold by the dealer Gabriel Wells in the 1920s, may be the last obtainable book of the Old Testament printed by Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer in Mainz in the 1450s, Mr Lowenthiel said. More than that, “it’s a book from the greatest of books, something that grabs the heart of everyone who understands.” It’s also the story of the Jewish festival of Purim, “a joyous book,” and one of the rare stories of women’s experience in the Bible. “Esther is standing up to authority and doing the right thing in an ancient world dominated by men.”

Mr Lowentheil knows a bit about doing the right thing himself. He purchased two rare books of Americana in 1998 and sold them to collectors, only to learn in 2013 that they were from a cache stolen from the Swedish National Library over a long period by its then-head of manuscripts, Anders Burius. Mr Lowentheil promptly reacquired the books and handed them back to the library, at considerable personal cost. The vast majority of the stolen volumes have not been found; only six have been returned to Sweden. But to Mr Lowentheil, such volumes aren’t just commodities: they are “irreplaceable pieces of our cultural history.”

Would that all dealers felt, as he does, that rare books are “a vital link in a long chain” of history, and that dealers have a responsibility to safeguard that chain. Mr Lowentheil sees his acquisition of the Gutenberg Bible fragment in the same light. Noting that it sold for $100,000 a page, roughly the same price as single pages that have come on the market in recent years, he said he feared that another purchaser might have been tempted to buy it and sell it piecemeal.

The history here is instructive. Wells wrongly assumed his Gutenberg Bible was incomplete, consisting as it did of the Old Testament alone—so he broke it apart. Decades later, its companion volume was discovered in Belgium. The damage was irreparable. I wrote about what Mr Lowentheil called this “culture of dismemberment” the last time a single page came up for auction. There was a “moral criminality to what Wells did, even though he bought it legitimately,” Mr Lowentheil said. Today, “by keeping Esther together, by putting something together that was taken apart,” he says, “I’m trying to keep the chain together.”

Together with his son Jacob Lowentheil at the19^th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop in Brooklyn, Mr Lowentheil plans to safeguard this Bible book until he can find it a new home. One that puts Esther’s story into a fresh perspective—not only that of a valuable chunk of the world’s most expensive book.

 

 

The other day I was absolutely gobsmacked (as they say here in the U.K.) when I received a Facebook notification from a gentleman named Chuck Richman from Washington, D.C. He very kindly wrote to tell me that his book club had read “Gutenberg’s Apprentice” and enjoyed it very much. What’s the big deal, you may be tempted to think; I’m happy to report that many book clubs have cracked my novel. But people, get this: his book club isn’t any ordinary book club.

It’s the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS BOOK CLUB. Think about that for a minute. America’s national library isn’t only the world’s largest, with more than 32 million volumes in 450 languages, as well as the official depository of everything published in the United States. It has a hugely dedicated staff who—gasp—adore books and have devoted their lives to cataloguing and caring for them. And who, it transpires, are constantly enhancing their own knowledge of their bibliographic treasure trove.

I don’t know how many full-time members The Library of Congress Book Club has, or whether or not they are all docents like Mr Richman, whose job involves showing the public parts of the collection to visitors. But he and his “fellow docents,” Mr Richman informed me, had read and discussed my novel. I’m guessing they did so at least in part because the Library of Congress, of course, has a copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

Their vellum copy is, in fact, considered the most perfect volume of the 48 still in existence. The “St Blasius-St Paul” copy was originally owned by German Benedictines in the Black Forest, and is one of only two copies that is bound in three, instead of two, volumes, in white calfskin. As it happens, this is also the copy of the Bible I consulted most closely, through the fantastic digitized Octavo CD Edition the Library published in 2003. It is beautifully illuminated with blue and red initials; I feel very close to this copy indeed.

Mr Richman’s note informed me that 18 docents had read the book and offered the following report: “Your book has encouraged us along in our ongoing Gutenberg dialogue. It will help us to showcase in our tours the library’s Bible on display here in Washington, D.C. Thanks for helping us along with our lifelong learning project.”

I imagine that “Gutenberg’s Apprentice,” published in the USA in 2014, has a place in the library’s massive storage shelves as well. But having the story of the making of this amazing book on the minds and lips of those who tell visitors about the Bible feels way more important, somehow. As the Octavo edition notes: “Today the Gutenberg Bible is on permanent display in the Great Hall of the Library, and is seen by about one million visitors each year.”

Recently I found a note on my Facebook page from Christina Scheffer in Sweden, a descendant of the real Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim. The printer’s great-great-grandson Johannes, it turns out, made his way to Sweden in 1642 at the request of Queen Kristina, bringing with him “a wealth of books, well needed to build the library at Uppsala University.” I consider it a fitting tribute to his ancestor Peter that this educated man became a professor of “eloquence and government” thereafter. The Mainz printer Peter Schoeffer’s wife Christina, it appears, lent her name down the nine Swedish generations to the current holder of the name—as did his grandson Ivo, who carried on Peter’s print shop in Mainz.

The legacy of this man is interesting: it touches on one of the most contentious questions in printing history. His son Johannes continued Peter’s print shop when his father died in 1503, and slowly but surely, tarnished Peter Schoeffer’s name by claiming the invention for Fust and Schoeffer alone. By the time that lie was put to rest in the 18^th century, the damage to Gutenberg’s collaborators was done. I can’t but help believe that Peter Schoeffer would have been appalled at his son’s falsification.

The evidence suggests that Peter Schoeffer was a modest man. He was devout, and of sufficient gravity to be appointed a city judge. He made no wild claims about his own contribution. Only a few records of this survive: one is Trithemius’ own account of how Peter told him, circa 1485, that “he had found a faster way to cast the letters.” The second is the colophon he had printed at the back of his 1470 edition of the Letters of Jerome. His description of the history could not be clearer:

“Praise to He who gave man art, who gave it also to the excellent masters in the art of lettercutting, both Johannes, Gutenberg and Fust, these two who turned Mainz into the first city to cast type. With them was Schoeffer, who later broke beyond them, met and exceeded those same goals. Thanks to his ability and determination, a gift of God, he exceeded his forbears in the art of lettercutting.”

My novel tries to do justice to all three men, whom their contemporaries referred to as the “Holy Trinity” of printing. But of course, I’m partial to Peter (even if I adopt the English form of Schoeffer over Schöffer). After all, he was the artist of the three—and beyond his incomparable typographic legacy, and all those Swedish and German descendants, he left another enduring bequest. Raise a toast: it’s Schöfferhoffer beer, originally brewed in the Schöfferhof printing works in Mainz. Proof that from printing, all good things flow.

Some have taken me to task for my unflattering portrayal of the great inventor of printing, Johann (or Johannes) Gutenberg. Why, reviewers and readers often ask, did you portray him as so egocentric and selfish? There are two answers to this question.

The first is that I don’t see him at all that way. In my view, he’s less egocentric than driven; he’s not so much selfish as wholly devoted to achieving his goal, no matter what the cost. I don’t believe that his goal was mainly to achieve glory for himself, although this cannot be excluded as playing a role. I believe he was one of those obsessive geniuses so focused on his prize that the rest of life—human interactions, basic hygiene, you name it—came far behind. Today we might call him autistic or Asperger’s or “on the spectrum” – he was arrogant, combative, vituperative, and absolutely pig-headed in his determination to see the thing through. It took ten to fifteen years to perfect the technology he began work on in the 1440s in Strassburg, and through it all, he didn’t give up.

The second answer is: I surmise all this from the historical record. I didn’t set out to topple Germany’s most cherished hero from his pedestal. Not at all. But as I delved into his life, and began to grasp the way he dealt with people, I began to see him as a brilliant but fairly callous guy. He was ruthless in defending his own interests; he did have the Mainz treasurer seized for nonpayment of his annuities; two of his three businesses ended in acrimonious lawsuits. The most telling lawsuit for me was one filed against him by a jilted woman who claimed he had promised her marriage. Gutenberg won the suit, but apparently insulted one of her witnesses so colorfully that he was fined for his foul language.

He was a complex character: devout and close to clerics of the cathedral chapter, and yet bitter, too, possibly seeing himself as a victim of the endless strife between the guilds and his own patrician class. Ultimately Johann was not accepted as a full-fledged member of the “Elder” class, because his mother was a commoner. Because he didn’t have four patrician grandparents, he wasn’t allowed to be a member of the elite club the Companions of the Mint. He left Mainz in his early 20s to seek his fortune elsewhere. His biographer, Albert Kapr, noted that he drank “impressive quantities” of wine. I imagined him as a person driven not only by creative energy, but a chip on his shoulder and a need to make his mark.

In the novel, Peter constantly asks himself and the Abbot Trithemius whether a person has to be hard in this way to achieve something truly great. (The movie “Whiplash” raises the same question). It’s a question for which psychologists don’t really have an answer. It is necessary to have a kind of tunnel vision, to not care in the least what others think or do or say, to create something truly new and transformative? Many great artists have been this way; megalomaniacal behavior is fairly common among tech innovators and fine printers alike. Maybe it goes back to the God of Hebrew scripture: yes, he was generative, but a little too heavy on the fire and brimstone for my taste.

Many novelists create timelines as they’re writing. I had a big brown paper scroll on my study wall on which I tracked the historical actions of the pope, the archbishop, the guilds, and Gutenberg’s printing workshop. But the real timeline, the one that made my heart beat fast, was something much smaller and more arcane: two taped sheets of paper that by now are soft with folding and scribbling and use. (One half is here above, the full thing is below)

These scanned images don’t do justice to my enlargement of the production schedule for the Bible of 42 lines first developed by the German bibliographer Paul Schwenke in 1923. This was the key to it all: the secret heart of Peter’s story, his and my Holy Grail. Schwenke had analyzed the typesetters’ peculiarities and come up with 6 compositors with different stylistic tics; each had a number of “production units” assigned to him. A testament to Schwenke’s brilliance arrived sixty years later, when physicists at UC Davis analyzed the composition of the ink in two different copies of the Gutenberg Bible. What they found blew everyone’s mind: they could actually identify pages that had been printed with the same batch of ink; this occurred at two different places, marked with a big dot and a star. Even more incredibly, perhaps, their analysis absolutely confirmed Schwenke’s ordering of when each quire had been set and printed.

For me this chart was heaven-sent. No one to my knowledge had done what I did next: determine which books of Scripture corresponded to the pages. You can imagine the nerdish pleasure I derived in puzzling this all out: which compositor was setting exactly which pages on what day. They were not, of course, printed in reading order, but parceled out to different compositors; thus the Book of Jeremiah, for example, was set concurrently with Luke and some of the Psalms. I also had to establish a larger timeframe for when the crew began the actual printing and finished it: this was made easier by a recently rediscovered letter from the Kaiser’s secretary, Piccolomini, asserting that he’d seen quires in Frankfurt in October 1454. I was able to overlay a calendar at the top, in smudged pencil, incorporating political events and specific proven moments in the Bible production, like the decision to increase the size of the edition just after three quires had been printed.

Closely studying this chart, one can observe many things. There were pauses and breaks; there were moments when one compositor took over the work of another. There were periods where two presses were used in a curious zigzag fashion, printing each other’s recto and versos, as proven by the ink. There are days of long and short light, freezing days of winter and boiling days of summer, and on each of these days I could make an educated guess at which exact gospel texts these men were reading as they set them. I felt so privileged that in my omniscient capacity as author I gave a similar chart to Peter, too, to hang up in the workshop. Making a book, whether in the 15^th century of the 21^st, is what the French call “un oeuvre de longue haleine” ––a work of long breath. It helps to have a chart to see the end.

 

 

The first question readers of historical fiction usually ask is how much is real, and how much made up. It’s a fair and important question, given that that novels and films reach a larger audience than those who read books of history. How close is this story to the real story? all of us should ask. I’ve been amused by the assumptions some have made about Gutenberg’s Apprentice. One reviewer said “obviously, Christie made the whole thing up;” another lauded my historical accuracy. A surprising number turn to Wikipedia to “refute” my version of the tale. And that is the main point I want to make here: however well-grounded this story may be in fact, it will always only be my version, one interpretation, of the complex, fragmentary history of the invention that has come down to us.

Much as an author has to finally believe in her version, literally fall in love with her story, we should never lose sight of the fact that this is just one reasonably well-informed view of what may have really happened. Others steeped in the same research may and have come to very different views of the roles played by Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer. I based my view on contemporary accounts from the 15^th century of Schoeffer as a gifted typographer, as well as his own documented conversations with the Abbot Trithemius that he had invented something key at a point early on in the Bible’s production. Others have doubted the veracity of Trithemius’s account, but I am not among them.

What I will say is that I have been a journalist for thirty years, and am therefore a stickler for facts. Anyone who’s been fact-checked for a long magazine article knows that you have to double- and triple-check every assertion you make. Many have also asked me why I didn’t simply write this book as nonfiction. The answer is simple: there’s not enough proof on which to build a nonfiction book. Thanks to invading armies and bombs and the natural reticence of medieval people to conveniently document their actions for posterity, reading the Gutenberg record is like reading tea leaves. There are some facts; there are the books; the rest is inference. The journalist in me built this story on fairly solid bedrock; I spell out all my assumptions and sources in a detailed Historical Note on this site (under “Gutenberg Bible”). Unlike a lot of novelists I admire, I didn’t put it in the back of the book, which was long enough already. It lives in perpetuity online—that’s one nice gift of the digital world to the age of print.

 

 

 

How incredibly beautiful illuminated manuscripts and early printed books can be. One of the joys of the digital age is getting gems from painted margins delivered directly to your desktop via scholars like Erik Kwakkel and Jesse Hurlbut. Maybe because I spent so much time in the mind of my former scribe Peter Schoeffer, I often stop to think about the man or woman whose artistry we so admire.

They bent over intently, like we do, above an angled surface, their necks and shoulders tense. This, to me, is the enduring interest of history, realizing that people who lived half a millennium before us behaved much as we do today. As I type now, I’m remembering the words of the British medieval manuscript expert Michelle Brown, who says the scribe “unleashes tongues with the fingers.” It’s the physical aspect of that work that interests me. Because they didn’t only “enter the desert of the book to preach with the pen,” you see. They endured brutal, backbreaking, eye-fogging hours and weeks and years of work for God—which is to say for beauty and transcendence.

We know this because medieval scribes didn’t just leave us gorgeous copies of the great works of antiquity, and all those shimmering and gilded forms. In margin after margin, they also left us little bombshells of complaint. I quoted a few of them in “Gutenberg’s Apprentice,” but couldn’t include them all. So here without further ado are a few gems culled through the ages from the marginalia—a little tour of calligraphic hell. Next time you carp about your neck from hours spent scrolling through your Facebook feed, consider this: at least they left us something of enduring value.

 

“Let the reader’s voice honor the writer’s pen. Let the copyist be permitted to put an end to his labor.”

“The parchment is hairy.”

“Thank God it will soon be dark.”

“Thin ink, bad vellum, difficult text.”

“The lamp gives bad light.”

“X labored on the writing of this book, and his body was much debilitated by early rising.”

“Three fingers write, but the entire body toils.”

“Just as the sailor years for port, the writer longs for the last line.”

“Now I’ve finished. For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

 

 

 

There won’t be any other like it. Indulge me in sharing a few highlights before 2014 fades utterly away. It was the year not only of “Gutenberg’s Apprentice,” but the unveiling of a unique replica 15^th century press at the St Bride Foundation in London, (shown at left) handcrafted by the printer and woodworker Alan May. I had the privilege of launching my novel right next to it, but couldn’t share the photos until it was formally presented two weeks later at the Printing History Society’s 50^th anniversary conference “Landmarks in Printing.” To my delight and not a little abashment, I was allowed to address the conference’s heavy-duty contingent of early printing experts. Fresh from my three-week American tour, which included bookstores and type foundries, literary centers and colleges and libraries, I felt reasonably prepared, and thrilled to be able to share the few nuggets of hitherto unremarked research that might be of interest to bona fide scholars.

Many remarkable meetings occurred in my travels, but several in particular bear noting. Thirteen years ago I read about some research at Princeton; in Seattle last October I actually met the physicist who did that research (with the noted incunabulist Paul Needham) and thereby launched me on the mad enterprise of telling the story of the Gutenberg Bible. The odds of me meeting Blaise Agüera y Arcas were hugely long; it happened only through the happy chance of sitting next to his neighbor at a booksellers’ convention. The perfect synchronicity of it amazed me – as did Blaise’s timely appearance at a technology conference in London that allowed him to attend my British launch party. Another thrilling encounter took place in cyberspace, when I tweeted a photo of Peter Schöffer’s earliest 2-color types back at Erik Spiekermann, a world-renowned typographer and graphic designer who at the time I hadn’t heard of. A lively friendship has ensued, and the exchanging of many books and impressions as we both migrate between Berlin and London, and shortly, Munich (stay tuned for news of our panel at the DLD conference on the persistence of print in a digital age, which I’ve secretly titled “Gutenberg’s Revenge.”)

Twitter enabled that connection, as social media and email have allowed me to spread the news of the book far and wide to potential readers. I preached the Gutenberg gospel in newspapers, on the radio, in person, and even on TV. Through it all, I felt a marvelous, circular serendipity at work. I had followed my bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say, and it led me back home. The publication of my first novel, about my first love, printing, has sewn together so many disparate strands in my life, from printing to tech, from London to San Francisco. It is being read by atheists and Catholics, technologists and craftspeople; besides the big papers, it’s also been written up in Fine Books and Collections, InfoWeek and CatholicHotDish. I can’t help but think what a kick my grandfather, the mid-century type founder and compositor, would have gotten out of it all. Remarkably, my private obsession has done its own small part in bringing the wonderful craft of letterpress back into view.

*with a tip of the hat to Tom Lehrer, maker of irreverantly brilliant songs

How much do we love books? Let us count the ways—till Christmas and beyond. Starting today, your favorite quote about the beauty and value of the book could win you this beautiful letterpress keepsake, as well as a chance at a free copy of the gorgeous hardback edition of Gutenberg’s Apprentice.

The keepsake was printed on a Vandercook proofing press in Santa Cruz, California, at the Foolscap Press. It features a woodblock print by the prolific 16^th century German artist Jost Amman, showing a view of a contemporary printing house. The birth of the printed book took place in just such a workshop, though probably not one with such lovely light streaming through arched and leaded windows!

Winning entries will receive a keepsake in the mail from Harper Books, my American publisher, and we’ll put your name in the hat for a free copy of the book. It’s truly beautiful, as I’ve written before.  Please submit your favorite quote about books or literature more generally here. (We can only ship to U.S. addresses, alas.)

I’ll feature the best quotes at gutenbergsapprentice.com as time goes on. And to start us off, here’s mine—from the year 1493, in keeping with our medieval theme. It’s from the great Nuremberg printer Anton Koberger, who sent out his magnus opus to customers with this printed wish:

“Speed now, Book…a thousand hands will grasp you with warm desire, and read you with great attention.”