The Book of Secrets

LXVIII

Mainz

I stepped out of the front door, under the carved pilgrim, and turned towards the cathedral and the market square. It was not far, but in that meagre distance the street expanded and contracted many times. Sometimes it was so narrow even a dog cart could barely pass; in other places it spread wide enough to become a small platz, where gossips lingered and hucksters sold pies and hot wine from barrows. It made even the shortest journey a tale of many chapters.

One of these places where the road opened was outside St Quintin’s church, where women came to gather water from a fountain in the church wall. A tall house stood on the corner opposite. The plaster between its timbers was coloured a lusty red, which had in turn been painted with garlands swagged along the dark timber ribs. Its name was Humbrechthof; it belonged to my third cousin Salman, who had lived there until a committee of guildsmen took over the administration of Mainz some years previously. Thinking these new men meant to beggar the ancient families into bankruptcy, Salman fled to Frankfurt. The house had stood empty since then. I had written to him, giving him to understand that the situation in Mainz was worse than his most outraged imaginings, and declining fast. When I offered to take his empty house off his hands for a token rent, to protect it from the mob who would otherwise surely make it a brothel or a church of the black mass, he could not agree fast enough.

I entered by a gate, passed through a passage under the main house, and entered the courtyard within. Fust and the others were already there: Saspach, Father Günther, Götz, Kaspar and a young man I did not know. Fust nodded to him.

‘My adoped son, Peter Schoeffer.’

He was a thin, earnest-looking youth, with pimpled skin and fair hair that flapped in the November breeze. I thought him diffident enough, but when he shook my hand it was with a look of extraordinary intensity.

‘An honour, Herr Gutenberg.’ His eyes were pale, icy with purpose. ‘Father has told me about your art. You may rely on me absolutely. I thank God I will be part of it.’

‘Writing makes his hands sore,’ joked Fust. He stood a little further from his son than affection would have permitted, an old dog wary of his pup.

‘So this is where we will make our workshop,’ Götz said. The house suited our purpose well: it was not tall, but wide, with large windows onto the yard. Over time, my cousin Salman and his forebears had closed in what had once been an ample garden, joined the outbuildings together and extended them upwards until they stood almost as high as the house. They enclosed the courtyard completely, like an inn or a trading hall, so that nothing overlooked it.

I unrolled the sheet of paper I carried and hung it on a nail on the storeroom door. The others gathered around. Most of them had seen some part of it, but only Kaspar had seen it in its entirety.

‘This is why we are here.’

Two columns of text ran down the page, perfectly aligned, exactly as Kaspar had sketched them. The grey cloud of pencil shading had become words, painstakingly set and carefully imprinted in the Gutenberghof. The text was black, save for the incipit on the first line, which was written blood red.

here begins the book of Bresith which we call Genesis

A long ‘I’ hung off the next line and dropped down the margin until its stem became a spiral tendril creeping around the edge of the page. ‘In the beginning…’

The page flapped and snapped in the breeze; I had to hold it down for fear it would tear.

‘Everything you see was pressed onto the paper by Saspach’s machine.’ This time it was true: there was no craft or trickery on the page. We had set and reset the text until every line filled its row exactly, stuffing parchment strips between the words to create the exact spacing. We had inked the incipit red and pressed it again. Finally we had run the whole page through another press to add Kaspar’s engraved initial.

Schoeffer was the first to respond. Unless Fust had shown him the indulgence, he had never seen our work before. I had expected he would be awestruck. He stepped forward and examined the page closely.

‘The words look faded.’

‘We used the old types,’ I explained. ‘Some are uneven; others not the exact height. Götz is preparing a new set which will improve the impression.’

‘And the alignment. It is almost perfect.’

‘Better than you could do,’ Kaspar growled from the back.

‘Absolutely perfect,’ I insisted. ‘If you rule a line down the margin, it touches the outer edge of every final character.’ God knew how much wasted paper had fed our fire to achieve it.

‘It is perfect,’ Schoeffer conceded. ‘But it does not seem it.’ He considered it a moment. Despite his youth and his presumption, everybody waited. ‘Some lines end with minor characters – hyphens and commas. They are so small they make the line look shorter than it is.’

He pointed to a section of text halfway down the page.

God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered togethere he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

‘If you put the hyphen in the margin, the weight of the text will be more evenly spread. More pleasing to the eye.’

I glanced at Kaspar. The mesh of scars on his face puckered as anger took hold of him. Before he could react, I said, ‘We will have to see. It is not like taking a pen and simply adding a stroke to the end of the line.’

Kaspar threw the boy a murderous look. Günther the priest prudently changed the subject. ‘How many Bibles will we be making?’

‘One hundred and fifty. Thirty on vellum, the rest on paper. I calculate we can manage two pages of the whole edition each day. Less in winter. We will have two presses, which Saspach will build there.’ I pointed across the courtyard, to the first floor of the house. ‘We will put them in the hall and the parlour.’

‘We will need to strengthen the floors,’ Saspach noted.

‘Brick pillars in the rooms below. We will use these as our paper store. Once you’re done with the presses, you can build a hoist to bring the paper directly up to the press rooms.’

‘What about the press in the Gutenberghof?’ Götz asked.

‘Too small. We will keep that to produce indulgences, grammar books, whatever else we can sell. There will be plenty of offcuts and scraps from the Bible we can reuse.’

Fust raised a stern hand. ‘There will not. Whatever is bought for the Bible goes to the Bible.’ He swung his stick in an arc around the courtyard, indicating the house while fixing each man there with a severe look. ‘Do you understand? This is our joint venture. I do not want my investment entering by one door only to steal out through another. I know many of you will often have cause to be at the Gutenberghof; some of you live there. What you do with your own time or your own materials is your concern. But every penny that is paid into this project will stay in it. Not one scrap of paper, not one letter of type, not one drop of ink.’

‘Nothing will be taken away from your investment in the project,’ I assured him quickly. ‘Everything will be accounted for, down to the last comma. As surely as they count every coin in the mint.’

‘As you know, I would prefer that you concentrated all your energies on this business.’

‘I have given you my word that nothing will delay it. But it will be months, God willing, before we are ready even to start pressing here, and a year until we reach full capacity. Even if all goes well, it will need two more years for the Bibles to be complete. Running the Gutenberghof press will provide income through these lean years, and a good place to train new apprentices.’

I walked across the courtyard to the stairs.

‘Let me show you where it will happen.’