Have begun reading proofs with red pen. Most authors will agree that by this point they can barely look at the words they’ve written.  It isn’t just the fact that I’ve written ten drafts of this novel, though that certainly explains a feeling of “enough”. It’s something even stranger—-the palimpsest of the text. As I read, I am also reading and hearing the ghosts of the words that are no longer there: the phrases I first wrote, perhaps, struck out by the editor, or a particular way I formulated a sentence that has been superseded by something cleaner, better. As I read, I am reading all the drafts at once, and this creates a certain vertigo. It’s like seeing all the past versions of myself, stretching back over seven years.

Proof-reading the map for the endpapers is a little more fun. I’m transported back to Mainz, to the little alleyways and squares I now know by heart. I have spent a long time prowling those lanes in my imagination. Since the Allied bombings of World War II, most no longer exist except on maps. I confess freely my unadulterated joy when I learned that the City Archive had created an online “Housebook” of Gutenberg’s Mainz, a triumph of Big Data that lists every owner of every property in the year 1450. For readers’ pleasure and my own inner nerd I asked the genius illustrator, Laura Hartman Maestro, to shout out a few special places: my favorite “Dungheap” (Unter der Schweinemiste), the bathhouse, the Synagogue, the milling ships that grind the wheat using the current of the Rhine. Take a tour of the medieval city if you like. I’ll be the wretch over there in the corner, up to my eyeballs in red ink.

 

I signed for the package from DHL and opened it. The “first pass pages” of my novel amounted to a stack of paper four inches high. This stack sat all day on the dining room table as I walked around it, stunned, unready to attack this pristine marvel with red ink. The kids, the husband, all said “Wow.” It lay in state for a whole day before I felt ready to approach it. I was reminded of a line I put in Peter Schoeffer’s mind about the Bible they had printed. “Twelve hundred eighty two imprinted pages: from the doorway of the shop they looked like giant loaves.”

It’s a strange feeling, seeing my story take a physical shape. Perhaps that’s why I grope for images, connecting my own work with all the works that I have read and loved before. A book is a long endeavor—for years I told people it was un oeuvre de longue haleine, a work of long breath. The final lap is when the text takes on its outward form; the incorporeal becomes something bodily at last. Small wonder that my thoughts turn to Christian images and transubstantiation. The novel is about the Bible, after all. The imagery arises from the subject, and from other books as well—which also came into print one day and made their way out in the world. Writing about the Book of Books as it set out on its first printed journey, I saw the loaves of the New Testament and all those multiplying fishes. But it was Tolkien whom I channeled when I pictured those big books: “Like oliphants, he thought: great hidebound beasts out of the East.” Like Sam Gamgee, considering my own book in a few weeks’ time: “Spreading across the land, bearing their thick and transcendent cargo.”

 

My book designer cares about em-dashes. She knows the proper use of small capitals combined with a slightly larger italic, the proper weight of leading between lines. I had barely finished appreciating the sumptuous cover when Leah Carlson-Stanisic’s designs for the inside pages arrived. The type was strong yet clear, and beautifully proportioned on the page. The margins were not squeezed; each chapter opened with a curlicued initial. How blessed I felt, to see such generosity in her design.

 

My novel tells the tumultuous story of the men who made the first great printed book, an object of surpassing beauty. Proofs of my modern pages in my hands, I understood for the first time how much that 15^th century Bible had inspired us all. The venerable old publishing house of Harper Books had grasped, without me uttering a word, that the hardback edition of “Gutenberg’s Apprentice” must be an object worthy of its subject too. We lovers of the printed book do notice things like folios and running titles, brackets, square or rounded, the oatmeal softness of good paper falling open in our hands. For us, the body of the book is an expression of its soul.

 

The Harper brothers were printers who founded their publishing house in 1817. Among the artifacts displayed in the lobby of the company’s new Manhattan office is a case of metal type. These are publishers who know that readers who care enough to buy a hardback book are entitled to an object of high craftsmanship. There’s more to my book I’ve yet to see—the map, the endpapers, the final feeling of the red cloth case that holds my words. But one thing seems quite clear. In this age when all assume the death of print, the love of well-made books will carry on, in an unbroken line from scribes to Gutenberg to sibling printers to today—and on and on.

They say nobody edits anymore in American publishing. I beg to differ. One of the extraordinary experiences of preparing “Gutenberg’s Apprentice” for publication was  working closely with the marvelous editor who acquired it, Terry Karten.

As a journalist, I’ve been edited all my life. It has helped me develop thick skin and a merciless approach to favorite (and probably overwrought) phrases. Having one of the best editors in the business take her red pen to my first novel was of another order entirely. Certainly, she line-edited with a vengeance. But far more importantly, she entered into the heart and soul of the novel, taking its shape and rhythm and intentions as seriously as I did myself.

It is axiomatic that in the bidding process a novel will be praised effusively, and only “minor changes” deemed necessary. A month later, those minor changes were a major restructuring of the end of the novel. I might have been crushed, or daunted, as I had been each time I offered a draft to my writing group to have it shredded. But long talks on the telephone with Terry about my hero, Peter Schoeffer, led me to implicitly trust my vastly more experienced editor’s judgment. She loved the book as I did; the difference was that she could see a shape I couldn’t. We spoke about Peter’s character, his goals, his fears; the exchange was a true exchange, in which new ideas and understandings emerged organically as we spoke. It was the kind of insight and questioning that every author longs for.

I returned to my revision, and re-visioned it, re-saw. The book evolved. We spoke again, took up anew the man who tells his story, examining his wounded, grieving heart. The ending flickered into view. The story took its form, solidifying slowly; I was, like Peter, an apprentice, taking shape beneath a master’s hand.

 

“Here begins”. The word that starts each section of the Latin Bible. For me it starts a fairytale. My first novel took five years to research and write–and less than a week to sell. Amid the flurry of phone calls, I kept pinching myself. In the end I had two wonderful suitors and had to choose. Both were deals known as pre-empts, which essentially meant they wanted to pounce and grab the novel before anyone else. I thought of pre-nups and felt decidedly wooed.

Of course I hoped to see my book one day in print. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that a large, prestigious house like Harper would acquire it as one of their lead titles for the autumn season. Call me Cinderella: this was like finding the golden ticket, snagging the golden ring.

Still, what one friend jokingly called my “overnight success” took many years. I came late to writing fiction, though I wrote stories as a child. I didn’t start studying literature as a writer until 1997, after the birth of my first child. Over the years, I grew my ability as a writer as the children grew, while reporting and moving around. Eventually, I started trying to find a home for my work in the world. As every writer knows, it’s a hard and lonely road.

When I clinched my deal, my kids went on Facebook to proclaim their pride. I was proud, too, and very clear on the message they should take from it. Karen Joy Fowler said it years ago at the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop: “I was not the most talented writer in my writers’ group, but I was the only one who stuck with it.” Never give up. Just persevere. Miracles can and do occur.

Next week, my debut novel “Gutenberg’s Apprentice” will appear like a Deus ex machina above the HarperCollins stand at Book Expo America in New York. I imagine the cover suspended above the Jacob Javits Center: enormous, backlit, glowing .The series of events that led to its appearance there is nothing short of miraculous. I’ll be sharing some of that process in the coming months on this blog, leading up to the book’s publication in September.

How my book began is also a story about how all books began before 1450: with an implement held in the hand. Even now, what book does not begin with a scribbled note? There is a sudden collision of ideas, a chance encounter in the world, an article, a sight. We grab a quill, a pen, a tool, and write. My novel tells the story of the last great transformation in the life of books: the invention of printing in medieval Germany. We stand again at such a moment, 560 years after the invention of movable type. I can’t help but notice, though, how much we still look like medieval scribes: hunched not above a manuscript in a scriptorium, but in cafés above our shiny laptops.