Booksellers and publishers and reviewers (and readers) love books, by definition. The book trade is filled with people who spent their formative years curled up, nose deep inside a printed b0ok, before turning to making and selling and critiquing the same. It’s for these bibliophiles that we created this hand-letterpressed keepsake. It depicts the earliest printing houses in early modern Germany in the mid-16th century, about a hundred years after Gutenberg’s time. The image is by Jost Amman, a prolific wood engraver. My good friends the printers at Foolscap Press in Santa Cruz, California, were happy to hoist it on their press and pull a few thousand two-color copies by hand. This hand-inked, hand-cranked beauty on heavy Rives etching paper seemed like the perfect way to let people know what “Gutenberg’s Apprentice” was all about: a love of craft, of fine things finely made, and respect for those artisans who carry the tradition on.
I’ve held some back for readers, too, of course. Once the novel is published, just over two weeks from now, Harper and I will be launching a little contest here to give some away.
Thank you. Gutenberg’s Apprentice is an astounding work. Not just the scholarship but a compelling writing voice, too. Add in a profound ability to conjure up the sights sounds and smell of a working letterpress shop in such a way that the reader will be transported. That it is Ms. Christie’s debut novel is amazing to me. Her writing is so skillful, tactile and so evocative that I’m glad I happened to have a printers devil typecase key on my desk to handle while I was reading or I would have felt cut loose and adrift. This will be a book I hold inside for a long, long time.