Gutenberg's Apprentice

Set in the mid-15th century, American author Alix Christie’s historical novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice (2014), fictionalizes the true story of the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, through the eyes of Gutenberg’s apprentice Peter Schoeffer. The first novel by veteran journalist Christie, Gutenberg’s Apprentice was hailed as a “bravura debut” by Kirkus Reviews. Other reviewers noted the novel’s historical accuracy, calling the novel a “painstakingly meticulous account of quattrocento innovation, technology, politics, art, and commerce” (Publishers’ Weekly).

The novel opens as 25-year-old Peter receives a summons from his foster-father, Johann Fust. Peter must abandon his apprenticeship as a monastic scribe in Sorbonne, “the apex of the world,” and return to Germany. The summons frustrates Peter, who loves his work, meticulously hand-writing copies of the Bible and other religious texts. But Fust, a relation by marriage, rescued Peter from certain poverty, and Peter is entirely dependent on him, so he sets out on the homeward journey.

Fust has bankrolled an erratic inventor Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden, known as Gutenberg. Fust is apprenticing Peter to Gutenberg, but Peter will also serve as a spy in the workshop, reporting on the inventor to his foster-father. Naturally, Peter wants to know what Gutenberg has invented. When Fust explains that Gutenberg has discovered a way to manufacture books by the hundreds, Peter is appalled. To him, Gutenberg’s press is “blasphemy…or just some shoddy trick.”



Peter’s reservations are confirmed by the workshop, “A searing darkness, stoked by fire, a throbbing clatter.” Enamored of the beautiful calligraphy of the scribes, the ugly metal letters of Gutenberg’s press terrify him. When he first encounters them, “He felt a dizziness, as if the ground had dropped away. Noise battered at his ears: he heard the furnace roar, the crude press crash, as if to rend in two the very fabric of the world.”

His impression is seconded by his fiancée, Anna, who argues that printing amounts to a refusal of the “gifts He gave us.”

However, as he comes to understand Gutenberg’s process, he realizes that there is room for beauty in printing and that he is the man to provide it. Peter develops a new font, a method of justifying text, and even a new procedure for casting the letters, which makes the printing crisper and cleaner. When after a year, Peter prints his first proof, he is moved by its beauty: “A power surged out of those words, a strength that even Peter had not pictured. The ink was as black as heaven’s vault, the letters sharp and gripping.”



In that moment, Peter undergoes a conversion: “This was the spark, the breeze that entered him—the understanding, too, that all the ways he knew were coming to an end.” Rather than a blasphemy, printing comes to seem to Peter like a gift of God.

Having perfected the technique, Gutenberg—whose principal motive is money and fame—enlists Fust to secure him a commission for some printed books. A contract with the Archbishop of Mainz falls through at the last minute, and the partners decide to print “Something over which no church or prince can exercise control.” The Bible.

By now, Peter feels that they are doing God’s work. “There was a bursting in him – a heady sense of strength, that wondrous feeling of pure rightness that does shine in every life for some brief time.” The ink of their Bibles is “as black as the night before Creation.”



However, the project is difficult and risky. Fust must pay for the whole thing, and Gutenberg proves financially unreliable. After a time, Fust begins to suspect Gutenberg of misappropriating his money, but there is nothing Fust can do; he has invested so much already that he needs a return on his investment. Peter feels loyalty to both men, while simultaneously feeling that both are misguided in their concern for profit, rather than the beauty and importance of their work. Above all, the work must be kept secret. Not only is the printing of the Bible potentially blasphemous, they fear rivals discovering their technique.

Hanging over this already tense situation is a sense of end-times. The great Christian city of Constantinople has fallen to the Ottomans: “Women screamed; men blanched. And then there was a dreadful silence, punctuated only by the throbbing of the bells.”

Gutenberg makes Peter the foreman of the Bible project: he himself has other things to do, although he’s cagey about what. A little while later, Peter comes across printed indulgences, made with Gutenberg’s earlier letters (the ones displaced by Peter’s own). The printing of these indulgences is not only religiously suspect, but it also risks blowing the secrecy of the Bible project, and “Discovery was death, the end.” Peter feels betrayed.



The project is nearly doomed when the Archbishop’s men search the workshop—only a last-minute warning gives Peter’s team time to hide their Bibles.

After two years of continuous work, the first edition of 180 Bibles is printed. At the autumn fair in Frankfurt, the Bibles sell “like wildfire.” The Kaiser’s envoy orders some copies for his master to examine.

It’s a triumph for the partnership of Gutenberg and Fust, but not one the partnership can survive. Gutenberg’s financial misdeeds come to light and Fust sues him. Their falling out feels to Peter as though “there was a rip in a fabric of the world,” but it also liberates him: He has been “Gutenberg’s apprentice, then his journeyman and foreman, finally his equal.”



Interstitial chapters reveal that the first-person narrative is being told by the older Peter to Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim Abbey, some 30 years after the events of his story. In his final remarks to Abbot Trithemius, Peter is able to let go of the wounds of Gutenberg’s betrayal: “‘He taught me what he knew,’ he says, feeling a tremendous love and sorrow rising through his body, leaving him at last. ‘And then he let me go.’”