Gutenberg's Apprentice Read Online Free

wretched grammars. But then this Gutenberg said he made it with a new technique. Ars impressoria , he calls it. To think he’s been at work at this, in secret, just a lane or two away. . . .
    “You know the house.” Peter heard the words dimly through the roaring in his brain. “The Hof zum Gutenberg, on Cobblers’ Lane.”
    “I have a trade,” he said thickly and flung the sheets back on the table.
    But Fust by then was standing, pacing, giving not the slightest indication he had heard. “It’s not the evenness—that’s just one part of it!” His voice was high; his cheeks were flushed. He had a canny and familiar look on his trader’s face—yet also a strange expression Peter didn’t think he’d ever seen. A kind of ravishment, an exaltation. Fust turned and fired a question. “It would take you how long—four days, five?—to copy this?”
    “Two days. At most.” Peter was fast, and young, and proud.
    “In those two days, this Gutenberg can make, by ‘printing,’ as he calls it, half a dozen copies, each one perfectly alike.” Fust came around the table and reached for Peter’s wrist. “Without the need to wear your fingers to the bone.”
    His son was pinned, immobile. Fust loomed above him, blocking out the bright stars in the sky.
    “Imagine it! My God, you have to see what this will mean. We can make ten times, twenty times as many copies of a book—in the same time and at the same cost.” His father’s hands were flailing in the air. “A book like this—or even longer ones. It’s limitless.” The look of wonder was replaced by triumph. He dropped a hand on Peter’s shoulder and shook him hard. “The moment I saw it, I was certain. This is the miracle the Lord has been preparing for us all along.”
    “A blasphemy, more like, or just some shoddy trick.” Peter shook Fust’s hand off, reached back for the printed sheets. In truth that booklet was a soulless, lousy thing. The letters were as rough as those cheap woodcarvings that the Dutchmen hawked; the lines were blotchy and the edges slopped with ink.
    Fust darkened. Then he straightened, and wiped a hand across his face. “But you must see. It is no accident that brought you here. Each step that brought you to this house, each book we’ve seen and sold, or that you yourself have written. What were they all, if not a preparation? What is our purpose here, if not for you to learn this blessed art?”
    “Blessed?” Peter jerked his hand; the pamphlet dropped. He stood and pushed the chair away. “This is no art. Who is the scribe here, you or I?” He shook his head. “I am a master of this art, as you well know. I have a trade, a life.”
    “You’ve had your wander years.” His father’s voice was curt. “They’ve gone on long enough. I need you here.” His feet were planted and his look severe.
    “You’d keep me here?” It came out as a bleat.
    “I shouldn’t even have to ask.”
    Peter felt his face flame up. And still he twisted, scrabbling for a handhold. “I never heard of any Elder lifting up a tool. What proof have you that this man Gutenberg has even made this in the way you say?”
    The thing could easily have been a carved wood plate, as crude as any made to crank out images of saints and the few letters of their names.
    “I am told that a goldsmith does the carving and the casting of the metal shapes.”
    “A smith.” The very word was leaden. Fust had tried once already to make a smith of him, a goldsmith like his uncle Jakob, and their father before that—and when that didn’t take, a merchant or a lawyer. But Peter had found a trade all his own and had excelled. Must Fust now snatch it all away?
    His father had lent this man vast sums. Now he would lend him his own son. Not his only begotten, though, Peter thought, the anger surging. He was no longer that.
    “Do it,” his father said. “For me.”
    Peter heard the words of Jesus, on that dreadful eve. Do this, in memory of me.
    “It is a