Endymion Spring

HISTORICAL NOTE:

The book you are now holding took on a life of its own when a good friend asked me an all-important question: "Who was Endymion Spring?" Until then, Endymion had been "more of a shadow than an actual person, a whisper rather than a voice." I decided to scour the stacks of the Bodleian Library to find out. What I learned next amazed me.

In a crumbly old volume from the sixteenth century, I discovered a long-forgotten secret: the true father of the printing press was not Johann Gutenberg, as most people believe, but Laurens Coster, a Dutch woodblock cutter who chanced upon a magnificent beech tree while walking in a wood near Haarlem. To please his grandchildren, he carved some letters from the bark. When he got home, he discovered that the sap from the blocks had bled into the handkerchief they were wrapped in and left a trace of his handmade alphabet behind. The stain gave him an idea: why not print books using movable pieces of wooden type?

Unfortunately, there was a thief in his midst. On Christmas Eve, while Coster attended Mass, someone broke into his workshop, stole his materials and fled to Mainz, where the felon conspired to set up the "first" printing press with Gohann Gutenberg, a talented goldsmith who chose to cast the type from metal, not wood — a decision that would change the world. The culprit was none other than "Johann Fust."

My pulse started racing. Was this true? I quickly turned to another book, which told a different story. No, Johann Fust was not a thief, but a shrewd businessman who invested a large amount of money in Gutenberg's press. He then dissolved his partnership with the inventor just before the Bible could recoup its costs, sued the man for all he was owed and was awarded the rights to the printer's equipment (as well as the Bible), effectively putting him out of business. Gutenberg disappeared into relative obscurity while Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer, spread their names far and wide across Europe…

I turned to another, darker volume. No, Fust was actually "Faust": the German magician who sold his soul to the Devil for all the knowledge and experience in the world. For centuries, the tale inspired many works of literature, including Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588), and led to a false belief that the press had diabolical origins…

How could there be so many interpretations of the past, so many cases of theft and deception? I picked up another book — a moldering volume by an eighteenth-century printer, Prosper Marchand — but it was riddle with footnotes that clarified nothing and I hastily discarded it. Then I came across a compelling account of the printing press by a mysterious man who had hoodwinked London society into believing he was an exile of a far-off country: "George Psalmanazar." He even spoke a made-up language. Could his version of events be trusted?

I delved further into the stacks, poring over each shelf, reading books at random. And yet there was a voice deep inside me quietly insisting that there was something I wasn't quite seeing, some secret that would bring all of these stories together. And that's when I noticed the curious hunchbacked figure on the Gutenberg coat of arms, the peculiar yellow-clad figure that no one has ever been able to explain…I opened my notebook. I suddenly knew the answer to that crucial question. Almost immediately, as if by magic, words started appearing on a blank sheet of paper.